


It's His Galaxy (And We're All Living in It)

by the_sentient_duck



Category: Milo Murphy's Law, Phineas and Ferb, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociation, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 71,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29454324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_sentient_duck/pseuds/the_sentient_duck
Summary: It is a perilous time for the galaxy. A brutal civil war has all but destroyed the Jedi Order, leaving the ailing Republic on the verge of collapse. Amid the turmoil, the evil Pistachions have spread across the galaxy, hunting down and destroying the remaining Jedi Knights. Narrowly escaping a deadly Pistachion ambush, Milo Murphy, the last known Jedi, awakens in a kolto tank in the Peragus mining facility...
Relationships: Milo Murphy/Zack Underwood
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Lovable Rogue at First Sight

**Author's Note:**

> It's my first fanfic, so be kind! And in the unlikely event that anyone from Disney is reading this, bring back Milo Murphy's Law!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Milo meets the two people that will change his life: the enigmatic, energetic Melissa Chase and the snarky, smug, and annoyingly cute Zack Underwood.

The Force is not infinite. That is not to say that it is finite. Such a thing could not be farther from the truth. It is merely to say that infinite is a grossly inadequate understatement of the extent of the Force. Words are simply not sufficient. The Force is always greater than the words we use to describe it.

While there is nothing more powerful than the Force, there are two things that come close. One of those things is stories. Every sentient species in the galaxy is built upon stories, stories that teach, stories that guide, stories that entertain, stories that encourage endless shipping wars, sometimes to levels that not every fan should be proud of. Indeed, there is likely a correlation between sentience and storytelling. It is how a species elevates itself and becomes more than just a beast on the hunt for its next meal.

The Force loves stories. It cherishes them so much that it gives a gift to those who have the ability to listen to it. The Force, you see, encompasses not just the universe that you and I inhabit, but every conceivable universe in the infinite multiverse. Anything that you can possibly envision, there is a universe in which it is happening. And some of us, known as authors, are lucky enough to be given a glimpse of stories occurring in those universes.

There is a universe where an exiled Jedi returned to a galaxy in turmoil, defeated both evil Sith lords and the dark demons of their past, present, and future, and saved the galaxy from a threat that could very well have destroyed the Force itself. It is a universe whose story was revealed to writers at Obsidian Entertainment in 2004, and then released to the public with a lamentable amount of cut content. 

The story that I am about to tell you is not from that universe.

There is a universe where Milo Murphy, a happy-go-lucky, eternally plucky and optimistic boy, was cursed from birth with bad luck – and overcame that curse on a daily basis to not just survive, but thrive. He defeated evil pistachio plants, helped save an innocent alien, and navigated the thorny paths of love. It is a universe whose story was revealed to writers at Disney in 2016, and then unjustly canceled after just two seasons.

The story that I am about to tell you is not from that universe either.

Rather, it is a story of both universes. A story of Milo Murphy, the Jedi Exile. It is a story that was revealed to me, the_sentient_duck, for a reason. What is that reason, you might ask?

Hell if I know.

But it’s a story worth telling. It is a story of daring do and glory, a story of what happens when the galaxy falls apart around you both literally and metaphorically, a story of forgiveness, of revenge, of sacrifice, and of the horrors of war. It is a story that contains tasteful homages to the glorious work of Matthew Woodring Stover, cameos from all your favorite Milo Murphy’s Law characters, and maybe even a few you might recognize from Phineas and Ferb. But most of all, it is a story about the one thing in the universe that is more powerful than stories and less powerful than the Force.

It is a story about love.

And like most stories that involve Milo Murphy, it opens up with something breaking.

*****

Glass shattered and the kolto tank that Milo had been floating in disintegrated into a shower of shards, depositing him on the floor with a roughness that he had become accustomed to in his twenty-two years of life. Milo had been born with a unique condition, never before seen in the records of galactic history. Anything that could go wrong around him, went wrong.

Most people would have considered that a curse.

Milo Murphy was not most people.

He knew the truth. It was not a curse. It was a blessing. Yes, bad luck followed him everywhere he went. But without it, his life would be unbearably, dreadfully dull. He would be bored to tears in _seconds_ if he didn’t have the Force or whatever entity was responsible for Murphy’s Law keeping him on his toes constantly.

And, honestly, he had been in worse positions than he was currently in. Yes, he had no memory of the last week, he was in an unfamiliar location, and judging by the sheer pain his body was sending him even _after_ he had been in the healing waters of the kolto tank, he had been busted up pretty good. Not to mention that everyone in the tanks around him was dead. But he was alive, there was no horde of vicious varactyls chasing him, and he still had all his limbs. And they were working too!

He used them to roam the medical section of the facility that he was currently in, hoping to find a doctor. Good news: He found one when he opened up the medical supply closet. Not so good news: She was as dead as the rest of her patience. She didn’t have any scorch marks on her, or any wounds on her body. If Milo had to hazard a guess, he guessed that she had been poisoned.

The holoterminal in her office just made him even more confused. Milo had apparently been on a freighter called the _Ebon Hawk,_ along with an android, a woman who was now dead, and a protocol droid. None of this was ringing any bells at all. Last he remembered, he had been out in the Unknown Regions, mapping uncharted territories. He had never even _heard_ of a freighter known as the Ebon Hawk, or had ever owned a droid in his life.

That wasn’t the strangest part of it, though. The strangest part of it was that the doctor had identified him as a Jedi. Somehow, it was just _public record_ now. But during the five years that he had roamed the galaxy with his sister and the four years that he had done it alone, no one had _ever_ pegged him as a former Jedi. He didn’t carry a lightsaber, he didn’t use the Force unless he absolutely had to, and he sure didn’t act like most Jedi did.

So how had they known?

A mystery for another time, Milo supposed. For now, he intended to solve the mystery of how the heck he would get out of this place. He walked into the morgue. Maybe seeing the dead woman who had been accompanying him would jog some of his memories.

The woman lying on the slab looked like she had just died. In fact, if Milo hadn’t checked for a pulse and found none, he would have assumed she was still alive. There were no marks on her; she must have been poisoned along with the doctor.

She was around the same age as Milo, with curly red hair, and wide, unseeing blue eyes. She wore ragged robes that reminded him somewhat of a Jedi uniform. In life, Milo probably would have abstractly classified her as attractive, though he had no interest in girls that way. Seeing her was jogging absolutely no memories, so he moved on to see if any of the other corpses had anything useful on them.

Milo had just found a plasma cutter when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He shrieked and fell on the ground in sheer shock. The sight before him didn’t make him feel any better: The dead woman that he was just examining was now alive (at least Milo _hoped_ she was) and looking at him with a faint grin on her face.

“Sorry!” the woman said, although she didn’t sound excessively sorry. “Didn’t mean to scare you there. I’m Melissa. Melissa Chase.”

“Milo Murphy,” Milo said, trying and failing abysmally at keeping the fear out of his voice.

“Nice to meet you, Milo Murphy,” Melissa said, putting out her hand to shake. After a second’s hesitation, Milo shook it. It was warm and had a surprisingly tight grip for a woman of her slight build. This was definitely not the hand of a dead woman. “Before you ask, no, I wasn’t dead. I was in a healing trance.”

Milo blinked. “You’re a Jedi? I was a Jedi once.”

Melissa hesitated, as if she was unsure much to tell him. “Yeah, I was a Jedi once too. It all got a little too regimented for me, you know? Creative differences and all that. You know how it is,” she added. Milo didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

She started circling him, examining him closely. Milo could distantly feel her reaching out with the Force too. “Do you remember me?” she asked quietly.

Milo shook his head. “I don’t have any memory of the last week, sorry.” Melissa stiffened and Milo had a feeling that whatever he had said had struck her _deeply._ He wasn’t sure why, but he knew that it was true.

But Melissa’s perky smile returned to her face with astonishing swiftness and if Milo didn’t know better, he would have assumed that he had just imagined her previous reaction. “Okay, well, don’t worry about it. You were busted up pretty bad in the explosion, and my memory is kind of fuzzy too.” She clapped her hands. “Not to worry! With the two of us, we can get through this.”

Milo nodded. Melissa seemed nice enough, and he was pretty sure that if she was really a zombie, she would have tried to eat his brains by now. “Let’s go!”

Melissa stood up, and then promptly fell to the ground with a wince. “Ah, man! My leg, it’s still busted up. I’ve got to go back into the healing trance. Here, take this.” She hobbled back to the mortuary slab, and tossed him a lightsaber.

It was the first time that Milo had held a lightsaber since he had been expelled from the Jedi Order. Narrative convention held that this should have been a triumphant moment, one filled with majestic solemnity, as he ignited the lightsaber and reassumed the mantle of a Jedi after casting it aside for so long.

The lightsaber should not have flickered, blinked out, and then exploded in his hands, yet that is precisely what it did. Melissa blinked. “Well, that’s some bad luck right there,” she joked. “I hope the rest of our adventure here doesn’t go that badly.”

Milo found that it was best to tell people about Murphy’s Law as soon as possible. Waiting just delayed the inevitable. So he explained the unique blessing that the Force had bestowed upon him at birth to Melissa.

She didn’t look remotely surprised or skeptical at all.

In retrospect, this should have been a warning sign.

But while Milo had many lovely qualities, being especially perceptive was not one of them, so he left her to return to her healing trance and started to explore the facility on his own.

*****

This is Milo Murphy:

On the outside, he has all the qualities that you would expect from a Jedi. He is warm, thoughtful, kind, open, and calm. Nothing ever phases him, not the most frustrating equipment failures, not the deadliest of wild animals, not the prospect that his blessing would make his life much shorter than average. Milo never saw any point in worrying about something you couldn’t control, and given that so little of what goes on around him was in his control, he never saw much point in worrying at all.

Yet the truth of the matter is that he was a terrible Jedi. Not because of any tendency towards the dark side, mind you. Anyone who spends more than five minutes in Milo’s company would tell you that if there was ever a person less likely to turn to the dark side, it would be Milo Murphy. If anything, his relentless cheerfulness and optimism would be more likely to turn _others_ to the dark side out of sheer annoyance.

No, Milo was a terrible Jedi because he _cares_ too much. He cannot help getting attached to the people he cares about. His adventuring partners, his sister, his boyfriends, he loves unconditionally and unreservedly. And every time, he has been disappointed. Everyone has left him, one way or another, whether it be through just walking away from him or through death.

Milo never even entertained the notion that his condition could _be_ a curse until his first boyfriend had been speared through the neck thanks to a booby trap in the catacombs beneath the Dai Bendu Monastery. Now the idea still pops up every so often, an unwelcome specter within his mind, and every time someone near him – both in terms of proximity and personal closeness – dies, it returns no matter how effectively he thinks he has exorcised it. 

Murphy’s Law has destroyed, in one way or another, every relationship he has ever had. People like Milo, but the cyclone of calamity that follows him, not so much. Even his sister, Sara, decided it was best that they part ways when Milo turned seventeen, the age at which one becomes an adult in most of the Core Worlds.

But Milo would not be Milo if he let Murphy’s Law bring him down. He would not be Milo if he believed, truly believed at his core, not just in errant thoughts at especially bad moments, that he had been cursed by the Force. Milo has Murphy’s Law for a reason and he believes, with the total certainty that, ironically, a good Jedi would indeed be defined by, that he will one day figure out what it is.

For now, Milo persists. He mends the wounds that each departure leaves in his heart, and he is left stronger after each recovery. He will never stop loving people. He cannot. He simply is not built that way.

Milo loves with all his heart, and that is why he was such a terrible Jedi, and why he is such a good person. And, when all is said and done, it is why he will save the galaxy.

*****

But for now, Milo had to face something that he hates more than anything: fighting. It’s not that he’s never done it before. Technically speaking, he served in the Mandalorian Wars, after all. No Jedi gets through their career fully peacefully – which, perhaps, says something about the nature of the Order. And it’s certainly much easier to fight homicidal mining droids who don’t appear to have a lick of sentience than living, breathing sentient beings. 

Milo has fought before, but most of the time, he uses weapons to do it. He gave up his yellow-bladed lightsaber when he left the Jedi Order, but he’s used blasters and vibroswords before. He is an adventurer, after all, and he has fought through more than his fair share of hostile wildlife. And, true, he could loot these weapons off of the corpses of the miners that scatter the facility, but after wrecking Melissa’s lightsaber – her _lightsaber,_ the most important possession that she ever had during her time as a Jedi – he didn’t want to take any chances.

So he used a far deadlier weapon than any mere blaster or vibrosword or even the most deftly wielded lightsaber. 

He used Murphy’s Law.

Milo sank into the Force and let it guide him to the weaknesses of the droids that he was fighting. With the barest minimum of effort, he flipped circuitry, scattered systems, made his enemies inoperable. It was not a technique that he used except in absolute emergencies, and never, ever on a living being.

Murphy’s Law could never be controlled, but it could be channeled and, sometimes, redirected.

And though Milo didn’t often think about the sheer destructiveness that his blessing could invoke, he was always uncomfortably aware of it when he channeled Murphy’s law. He knew – he didn’t guess, he didn’t estimate, he _knew_ – that if he wanted to, he could level buildings. Cities. Maybe even planets. He never _wanted_ to, but he _could._

 _There is no emotion,_ he thought as his enemies fell apart around him, knowing what a lie that was, _there is peace._ Milo no longer _believed_ in the Jedi Code, not as he did when he was a child but it could calm him sometimes. 

He needed that calm for what awaited him in the security room.

Everyone in that room, including the security officer was dead, but that wasn’t what bothered him. He’d have honestly been more surprised if they had been alive. No, what bothered him was what he saw on the security recordings left behind on the security officer’s holoterminal.

A security recording that indicated that the droids had just suddenly started going berserk as soon as Milo had arrived. Could his blessing have done it? Could…could it have killed these miners?

Milo hoped not. The last thing he needed was more guilt on his conscience.

Anyway, now that he thought about it, it didn’t seem that likely. The security officer suspected sabotage, after all. According to him, the miners, led by someone named Max, had sought to sell him to “the Society of the Dragon,” whatever _that_ was, and –

_Milo?_

That had sounded like Melissa. He reached out to her, connecting their minds together. For some people, that was difficult, for others quite impossible, but for Milo, it was easy, especially if the person on the other end was conducive to such things. _Melissa, what is it?_

_I think I sense someone else alive in the facility. He’s in a holding cell. Be careful, Milo, but don’t be afraid. I have a feeling we can trust this guy._

Well, that was good enough for Milo! He tried to send back thanks to Melissa, but got no response. After fighting his way through more droids, he managed to deactivate the stasis field and enter the holding cells.

There was only one person in the holding cells, held in a force cage and as soon as Milo saw him, he was instantly smitten. There was no other word for it. His stomach was doing backflips, and some ridiculous part of his brain that, thank the Force, currently had no control of his vocal cords, was already composing confessions of undying love.

He was about Milo’s age, with dark skin, shaggy brown hair, brown eyes that were richer and more beautiful than the most succulent chocolate that Trammis III had ever dished out. He wore a white shirt, a burgundy jacket, and tight – wow, _really_ tight – brown leather pants, and Milo’s eyes widened as he desperately tried to drink in every ounce of this beautiful man.

“HELLO?!” the man shouted, and Milo yelped and jumped into the air in surprise; with the Force boosting his efforts, he practically touched the ceiling. “Sorry for shouting, but you were zoning out there. I’d get a doctor, but, you know, I’m kind of tied up here. I’m Zack Underwood. And you are…?”

“Murphy,” Milo stammered. “Murphy Milo, er, Milo Murphy. I mean…can we take this from the top? It’s been a while since I’ve been around a guy as cute as –” He clenched his jaw shut before his traitorous lips could wreck his chances any further.

Zack didn’t seem to mind at all. He just gave him a slight smile. “Well, Milo Murphy, you mind letting me out of this cell? I swear, I’m not a bad guy; I’m just in here because I punched that asshole Max. He called me a,” and then he said a six letter word beginning with F that Milo had heard a lot directed at him across the galaxy, often when his flirting attempts went horribly wrong. “And I couldn’t let that stand. A guy’s got to protect his rep.”

Milo laughed nervously. “And you were angry because you weren’t gay, right? I mean, are you? Of course, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”

Zack just smiled at him (smiled, that’s all, so why did that single movement of his mouth make Milo’s legs turn to jelly?!) and said, “I’m not gay, no.”

Milo knew that, literally, the crashing sound was probably just another droid breaking down, but metaphorically, it was probably the sound of his heart breaking.

“I’m bi,” Zack said with a somewhat more devious smile. Milo’s own smile was probably nothing short of positively jubilant – he probably should stop doing it, he decided, in case Zack got the wrong idea. For now, he needed to be professional. For now. “Anyway, enough of that. Mind telling me what the kriff is going on here?”

Milo took a deep breath and briefed him on the situation. “Now it’s your turn. What’s going on?”

Zack shrugged. “Well, you seem to have figured most of it already. The parts you don’t know, I’m just as much in the dark as you are on, because, well…” He gestured at his surroundings. “I’m surprised that you told people you’re a Jedi, honestly. The bounty’s got to be astronomical now, because most of the Jedi are dead. Maybe all of them, who knows?”

Milo blinked. All of the Jedi _dead?_ The idea just didn’t seem to compute. After the Battle of Malachor V, Sara had taken him into the Unknown Regions, as far away from the Republic and the wars that it seemed to keep attracting as possible. And after he had struck out on his own and embraced his dream of being a full time treasure hunter/archeologist/historian, he had stayed mostly in the Outer Rim where the Republic had a shaky grip at best. He really had no idea what had been going on in Republic space for nine years.

But…what could have happened to leave all the Jedi dead?

“I’ve…been away since the Mandalorian Wars. What happened?” Zack laughed, as if Milo had been telling a joke, but when he realized that Milo was serious, his face looked serious. In fact, was it Milo’s imagination, or did he look a little uncomfortable?

“Well, Mechanus, he decided that saving the Republic from the Mandos wasn’t enough for him,” Zack explained. Mechanus had been the leader of the Jedi Crusaders, the rogue Jedi that had fought against the Mandalorians when most of the Jedi refused. Milo had once been one of them. Once. “He became a Sith Lord and declared war on the Republic. He and his apprentice caused a lot of damage…” His face went blank for a few moments. Had Zack lost someone to Darth Mechanus’s rampage?

Before Milo could ask, Zack’s face returned to its normal confident expression. “I was kind of on the fringes of things like you were, but from what I understand Mechanus had a change of heart and helped defeat his apprentice. I’m not sure what happened to him after that. I don’t think anyone is. The Republic won…but the Jedi lost. Their numbers were decimated, and the Order just…fractured. Anyway, that’s what I heard? Could you let me out? Pretty please?”

All of Zack’s guards _had_ to have been straight men, because Milo had no _clue_ how anyone else could have possibly have resisted that adorable expression. Milo was certainly no exception. He pulled the lever to deactivate the force cage, and followed Zack to the administration console.

Zack muttered to himself as he worked the controls. Milo was hopelessly bad with tech – very little of it ever stayed functioning long enough for him to learn how to use it – so he helped by not helping, staying far away from the console.

“Well,” Zack finally said, and then blinked when he saw that Milo wasn’t anywhere near him. He peered over at Milo’s direction. “What are you doing all the way over there?”

 _He’s going to think you’re a freak!_ Milo’s brain screamed at him. But Milo doubted that he could have ever kept any secrets from Zack even if he tried. “See, I have this condition. Murphy’s Law. Anything that _can_ go wrong around me _will_ go wrong.”

“Ah, this is Force stuff, isn’t it?” Zack said, his voice sounding uncertain. “Yeah, I don’t really know too much about that. It sounds like it sucks, man.”

“No way!” Milo said. He’d had this conversation more times than he could even count, but it was one that he would never give up on having. Murphy’s Law made him who he _was_. It wasn’t a curse; it was a gift of the Force. “Without Murphy’s Law, my life would be so _predictable._ It would be _mediocre._ Who wants _that?_ Anyway, you were saying about the console…?”

Zack snapped his fingers. “Right. Well, it’s really weird. All we need to do is cancel the emergency lockdown and then we can flee in your ship…but we can’t. It’s been completely blocked. All we have is comms, and I don’t think Max and his friends are going to be too happy to hear from you.”

“Well, we might as well give it a shot, right?” Milo said, trying to remain optimistic. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“Man, with that Murphy’s Law of yours, I thought you’d know better than to say things like that. But go ahead. Console’s yours.”

Milo sat down in the chair at the console and shouted, “CQ, CQ, CQ! Calling CQ, CQ, CQ! Anyone there? Does anyone read me?”

“Milo?” a man’s voice said. “Milo Murphy, is that you?”

 _Oh,_ Melissa’s voice said in his head, sounding somewhat surprised. _That’s Baljeet._

_Who?_


	2. A Miner for a Heart of Cortosis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Milo doesn’t bat an eye at dangerous conditions anymore. He’s accepted that his unique connection to the Force might kill him at a young age. Zack hasn’t.

Who is Baljeet Tjinder, Milo asks? Well, this is Baljeet Tjinder:

He is completely unique in the universe, an android, invested with, to the best of his knowledge, full and complete sentience. He had been built on a whim, really. His creator, Phineas Flynn, had been lonely, and had wanted a friend, and since everyone had thought he was too weird to be friends with him, he had built one for himself. Of course, he never forced Baljeet to be his friend. He never forced Baljeet to do anything ever. Baljeet chose to be his friend, and it was a choice he never regretted. Well, not often, anyway.

He is not a droid. He has no programming in the sense that most people refer to the concept when they are speaking of droids. He has nothing compelling him to go forward with a given course of action other than his own thoughts. He has emotions. He feels things. He has complete and absolute free will.

He is not a human either. He has no biological needs. He does not eat, he does not sleep, he does not age, and he does not forget. He looks like a human, but he is not one. He is a creature of machinery and circuitry, not of flesh and blood. When he dies, if such a word could be applied to him, he will not become one with the Force as Phineas told him organics do.

As such, he has fit absolutely nowhere. He has tried to make friends with droids and with humans, but the droids hated him because he was too much of a human and the humans hated him because he was too much of a droid. Baljeet does not regret being alive, but he does wish sometimes that Phineas had thought through the repercussions of casually creating life.

Phineas rarely thinks through the repercussions on anything, though, and it’s been that way for as long as he has been alive. He certainly didn’t think of the consequences of just walking out on the galaxy when it required steady leadership. His can-do attitude, his belief that anything is possible, that unbearable optimism…the galaxy desperately needs it right now. It does not need Baljeet, in his opinion.

But Baljeet will have to suffice. And despite his fears, his doubts, and his insecurities, he knows that he cannot give up until his objective is accomplished, or he dies in the attempt.

Because more than anything, Baljeet Tjinder is defined by his refusal to give up.

*****

Phineas gave Baljeet his spaceship and Isabella gave him his mission and since then, he had spent the last five years searching for the person who was best qualified to rebuild the Jedi Order. Initially, Baljeet was skeptical of the necessity of this task. After all, the Jedi Order hadn’t exactly done the galaxy much good over the past few decades, to say nothing of what they did to Phineas himself.

But as he wandered the galaxy, he started to come to the realization that his initial impression was wrong.

The galaxy was no stranger to the physical damage of war and the varied worlds of the galaxy, under the direction of the youngest chancellor ever elected, were starting, painstakingly, to pick up the pieces. But there were more costs to war than the strictly physical. There was a mental cost. The Jedi Civil War, as some people were starting to call the war that Mechanus had brought forth, had invoked a widespread psychic trauma – there was simply no other words for it – on the varied sentients of the galaxy.

The Mandalorian Wars had been devastating, but straightforward. There had been clear heroes and villains – the evil Mandalorians and the heroic Jedi savior Mechanus. Of course, it hadn’t actually been as simple as that, but it had been _perceived_ as that simple, and perception often became reality.

The Jedi Civil War, on the other hand, had come as a total shock to the people of the Republic. They had _trusted_ Mechanus, and he had repaid that trust with betrayal after betrayal. He took up war against the very government he had fought to save, against the _people_ that he had fought to save.

And now it was over, and though the Republic limped on, the Jedi Order as an organization was gone. Baljeet didn’t understand politics very much, but he understood engineering. The Jedi Order was a load bearing pillar to the edifice of the Republic. It was a force of unity, a check against the corruption that would eternally plague the Senate. At least, that was how the people perceived them. 

Chancellor Fletcher was a good man, a man of few words, true, but a man of action. He understood what needed to be done to heal the body of the Republic. But its soul? Not so much. Without the Jedi, even Chancellor Fletcher could not save the Republic, because no one would _believe_ in it anymore. They would not believe it was _worthy_ of existing.

Baljeet knew one truth: It was time for the Jedi to return.

But it was hard to _find_ a Jedi anymore these days. They seem to have all vanished, as if something – or _someone_ – was hunting them down. And reports on the circumstances in which these disappearances had happened were spotty at best. Some commonalities emerged – some sort of plant-like sentients have been spotted here and there when Jedi disappeared. But the information was as insubstantial as wisps of smoke.

The last five years of searching had been fruitless. Then Baljeet had met Melissa. Or, rather, Melissa had found _him._ How had she done that? That was a good question, and it was one that Melissa had steadfastly refused to answer. He had explained his mission to her, and he had been somewhat surprised when she had refused to take on the position of rebuilding the Jedi Order.

“Man, I couldn’t run a space waffle shop, much less the Jedi Order,” Melissa had told him. “My executive function skills, they’re kind of iffy, know what I mean?” Whenever Melissa had asked him that, the answer was invariably no. “Plus, I micromanage _everything._ But…” she said, her eyes shining bright, “…I can bring you to someone who _can._ ”

That was how Baljeet and Melissa had ended up getting in the middle of a battle between a Republic warship and what looked very much like a Sith cruiser. But it couldn’t be that because all the Sith cruisers were accounted for. Well, at least that was what the _records_ said, which was a disturbing development in itself. They had weaved and dodged their way through turbolaser fire and made a landing in one of the hangars aboard the _Harbinger_ (whose bright idea was it to name a _warship_ that anyway?) and stumbled upon Milo.

And that was where Baljeet’s memory stopped until he had reactivated himself in the hangar bay of what his literally encyclopedic memory informed him was the Peragus mining facility and heard a voice calling out to him. The friendly, astonishingly cheerful voice of Milo Murphy.

“CQ, CQ, CQ! Calling CQ, CQ, CQ! Anyone there? Does anyone read me?”

“Milo?” Baljeet said. “Milo Murphy, is that you?”

There was silence for a long while, and then Milo said, “Hi, Baljeet, I’m Milo. Nice to meet you! I’m really looking forward to meeting face to face. Kind of have a tiny favor to ask before that happens, okay? We need you to unlock the turbolifts to the administration level. Can you do that?”

“Of course I can,” Baljeet said with irritation. “I mean, it’s hardly even worthy of my talents.”

“Thanks, Baljeet! Over and out.”

*****

Zack was getting bored listening to Baljeet whine about the sheer inanity of his task (“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to unlock the turbolifts!”), so he decided to turn his attention to the Jedi whose presence in the facility had indirectly (or perhaps even directly?) led to the death of everyone else there.

He was, for lack of a better word, completely adorable, and pretty damn attractive too. Zack generally had a type, and Milo wasn’t it – he tended to go out with guys or girls who could (and sometimes had!) kicked his ass in a fight, and could take care of themselves. The kind of sentient who could handle themselves on a wretched hive of scum and villainy like Mos Eisley or Nar Shaddaa.

Milo was a precious Mustafarian lava roll, and if he ever stepped foot on Mos Eisley, he’d be dead or worse within a solar rotation. Logically speaking, he should not have appealed to Zack.

But matters of the heart and matters of logic never have and never will intersect. Even Zack knew that. He was certainly not _in love_ with Milo, but he could sense the beginnings of a crush forming. And now that Zack thought about it…he kind of liked that.

“Why aren’t you more upset by all this, Milo Murphy?” Zack wondered aloud, not realizing he had vocalized the words until it was too late. Or that the senses of Jedi were augmented with the Force.

He also didn’t notice Milo, who had been examining the various computers and machinery that lined the walls of the administration area like it was an interesting museum exhibit, approaching him until he was close enough to touch. _Close enough to kiss,_ some part of his brain whispered.

“Hey, if you think I’m just shrugging off all these dead people, you got another thing coming, Zack,” Milo said, sounding somewhat disappointed. Zack was somewhat stunned to realize how much Milo’s disapproval hurt him. “And if moping around could bring these people back to life, I’d be…”

“As lugubrious as kriff?” Zack said, half-jokingly.

“Zack!” Milo said. He was blushing. He was actually _blushing._ “I don’t know what that first word meant, but I sure as heck know what the second one means! Promise me you won’t use it again?”

“Aye, captain,” Zack said with a saucy grin. And he was telling the truth. Technically. But Zack knew a lot more swear words, and he’d use every one of them if it meant that he got to see that beautiful blush again and again.

Milo sat down against the display console, looking thoughtful. “I can’t control Murphy’s Law. But I _can_ control how I _react_ to it. I can choose to look on the bright side.”

“So what’s the bright side of this?” Zack wondered.

“I got to meet you, of course!” Milo said, and honestly, Zack wasn’t 100% sure that he wasn’t being so adorable on purpose. He was 99% sure, but not 100%.

Just as he was considering what would happen if he tried to kiss Milo, there was a beeping sound from the console, as it displayed a message indicating “Talk to me, Baljeet,” Zack said.

There was silence from the intercom.

“It probably just stopped working,” Milo suggested. “In fact, I’m kind of surprised that –”

A shower of sparks erupted from the console, and Zack and Milo barely avoided getting hit by them. “Yeah, that’s more like it,” Milo said, as cheery as ever. “So shall we go?”

Zack blinked. “Go…where?”

“Melissa had a ship,” Milo said. “We need to clear a path for her. Her leg’s broken, and there are all those droids between us and the hangar. Then we can double back and get her. What do you say? Ready to take on whatever’s waiting for us down there?”

Zack was not. But he’d _die_ before telling Milo that, that was how much he didn’t want to disappoint this guy. Yeah, he had it _bad._ “Sure, man. Let’s go.”

*****

Milo was in love. He was certain of it. He hadn’t felt about anyone this way since…well, since his last boyfriend. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t, you know, at _true_ love levels, but still, he couldn’t deny that every time he even _looked_ at Zack, his heart did backflips and he felt like he wanted to dance a jig. He even broke out into brief jig dancing once when he was positively sure that Zack was too busy gunning down a mining droid to pay him attention. Then he had tripped and run face first into a wall, and, yeah, no more jigging in the immediate future.

Thankfully, Zack didn’t appear to notice his obvious crush. And, really, what chance did Milo have with someone like Zack? He probably had men and women lining up to be with him, he was so gosh darned handsome. And Zack, well, he hadn’t _said_ anything, but he knew that Zack probably had more than his fair share of experience going up against the law. Why would someone like that be interested in a boring xenoarchaeologist like him?

As they navigated through the mining tunnels and the central control area, battling droids as they went, Milo was glad that he wasn’t a Jedi anymore, because non-attachment versus Zack? No contest.

At least they were able to clear up one mystery on their way to the maintenance area. Zack had recovered a hologram from the central control terminal of Max and his cronies discussing what to do about Milo. One of them had mentioned that they had served alongside Milo at the Battle of Malachor V, and that was how they knew who he was. Milo didn’t recognize him at all, but that wasn’t that surprising. There had been a lot of soldiers aboard the _Ravager_ when Milo had been aboard. He’d have been more surprised if he _had_ recognized the guy.

Zack pulled up some security camera footage and then let out a yelp. “I think we’ve got problems. The shields that were holding the tunnels back from, to use the technical term, going kablooey are failing. We’ll be fine if we can make it to the turbolift to the maintenance area, but we need to get there, stat!”

“No problem!” Milo said. “I can run really fast! I mean, I kind of have to, right?”

Milo was true to his word. The two of them stayed way ahead of the massive fireball that was sweeping through the area, and by the time they entered the turbolifts, it was barely visible in the distance.

It wouldn’t occur to Milo until later that it hadn’t been strictly necessary for Zack to hold his hand as they leapt into the turbolift. But when it did, it brought a smile to his face.

*****

“Good morning, and welcome to the maintenance wing of the Peragus mining facility!” a chipper mechanical voice said. It was even more cheerful than Milo’s own, and Zack didn’t believe that had been possible. “My name is N0R-MAN, but you can call me Norman!”

Zack didn’t like droids at all in the best of circumstances. Some circuit could flip in their head and they could start shooting everyone in sight. He’d seen it happen once, too. He especially didn’t like _this_ droid, who looked unsettlingly like a black-haired human being dressed in a tuxedo, albeit one who was ten feet tall.

And the fact that he was now chirpily pointing out the names and life dreams of all the dead miners to Milo as if they were interesting tourist attractions instead of rotting corpses didn’t exactly help his case.

“This is Gevork!” Norman said, pointing at a brown-haired miner with an absolutely petrified expression on his freckled face. “He was once a respected journalist on his home planet before he was exiled! He hoped to return to his planet and liberate it from the loathsome dictator that now rules it, but he was bisected by rogue mining droids! Now his wife and two daughters will never see him again!”

Even Milo was starting to look a bit freaked out now. “Yeah, okay. Listen, Norman, we’re trying to get out of here. We need you to – hang on, were you the droid that was brought aboard the _Ebon Hawk?”_

“That’s right! I brought you aboard the Ebon Hawk to save you from the evil Pistachions! They’re really not nice plants, you know!”

“Hang on a second,” Zack interjected, his voice filled with suspicion. “How come Milo doesn’t remember any of this?”

“I am sure there is a plausible explanation that does not involve me drugging him!”

Zack chuckled weakly and then dragged Milo into another room as quickly as he could. “Milo, call me crazy, but I think that droid killed all these people!”

Milo looked at Zack skeptically. “Aw, come on, Zack. You just met him. Give him a chance! It’s kind of rude to make judgment calls like that. Now, let’s check out this terminal.” Just as Zack was ready to shake Milo for being so painfully naïve, he realized what Milo was writing on it.

_I agree with you about Norman, but we can’t let him know we’re onto him. If he killed these miners, he could just as easily kill us too! Let’s just act like everything’s fine and then get the heck out of here. Cough if you agree._

Zack coughed and Milo gave him a thumbs up, then erased the message. Zack’s opinion of Milo slipped upward a couple of notches. He wasn’t just an amazingly pretty face. He had _some_ street smarts. Well, if Milo wanted to con Norman, then Zack would con him. He had conned _monarchs_ before. One murderous droid couldn’t be too difficult to outwit.

“Hey, sorry about that, man,” Zack said as they walked back over to Norman. “No hard feelings?”

“I am only programmed to feel soft, squishy feelings!” Norman assured him. “GROUP HUG!”

Zack shrieked in a way higher pitched voice than he ever wanted to have Milo hear from him as Norman swept the two of them into a hug that threatened to crush his lungs.

“So maybe you can refresh my memory as to…you know, what’s going on?” Milo said.

Norman was silent for a few moments, obviously trying to construct a lie. “But that story is so boring! Wouldn’t you rather hear about muffin recipes instead?!”

“Norman!” Milo said severely, putting his hands on his hips. “I thought we were friends!”

“Well, friends do help each other out when they have memory trouble!” Norman said. “I am a humble protocol droid, not a well-crafted assassination droid of unrivaled sophistication, originally constructed by Darth Mechanus to hunt down his varied enemies! My most recent master was the captain of the _Harbinger_ , a Republic warship, who ascended to the position through legitimate means and not through paperwork I forged!”

Seriously, did this droid not understand the meaning of subtlety at all? Zack wondered, and then nodded at Norman to continue. If he was spewing terrible lies, he wasn’t blasting them.

“Though accidents had been much more common than average since we picked you up to take you to Telos, the number and scope of them increased dramatically in the last days of your voyage, as if some saboteur who was certainly not me was taking advantage of them to cripple the ship!” Norman continued. “Then we ran into that troublesome Pistachion attack! Boy, those guys are real stinkers! They shot you up badly, so I had you put into medbay.”

Zack didn’t know what Pistachions were, but they didn’t sound good. Of course, for all he knew, they may have just been an invention of Norman. “Okay, well, this is all sounding very _plausible._ Well, we’ll just be going now.”

“Oh, I’m afraid there’s no way out!” Norman announced. “Of course, you could leave the maintenance wing through the airlock which leads outside the facility, but it is locked and only I have the password to the terminal that can open it!”

“Norm, could you please give us the password?” Milo asked, using that adorable grin of his. If Zack had had the password, he sure would have given it up just to see another second of that smile.

“I’m sorry, Milo, I’m afraid I can’t do that!” Norman said. “It’s against my programming to give out sensitive information to criminals like your friend here! In fact, maybe he was locked in the holding cells because _he_ sabotaged the facility!”

Before Zack could utter a word of protest, Norman had his neck in his mechanical hands and was starting to squeeze. “Don’t worry! He won’t trouble you for very much longer! I’m doing you a favor, really!”

Zack’s vision was beginning to go dark, and he was just glad that Milo wasn’t looking at the tears that were flowing down his face. In fact, he wasn’t looking at him at all. He was grabbing a crowbar from a table. Milo slammed the crowbar against Norman’s head with such intensity – probably with Force augmented strength – that the head flew off the body and landed in a crumpled heap in the corner of the room.

Zack watched carefully as the lights left Norman’s eyes. When neither the head nor the body looked like they were going to move again, he turned back to face Milo with shock all over his face. “You saved my life.”

Milo looked confused. “Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

Zack didn’t even know how to approach that question. On Nar Shaddaa, there weren’t a lot of people who would put themselves between Zack and a homicidal assassin droid, and the few that would, well, they’d only have done it if they thought that they could gain something by Zack’s survival. But Milo had just done it on _instinct._ He could have run and saved himself, but he didn’t. Not because he wanted something from Zack, but because it would have been _wrong._

And it was so risky! He could have been killed! Or worse, given that Norman had obviously wanted Milo alive.

“I guess that’s the sort of thing that Jedi do without thinking,” Zack said finally, “but in my neck of the woods, no one sticks their neck out for anyone. Thank you, Milo. I mean that. You’re an amazing Jedi.”

“I’m not a Jedi anymore,” Milo said, sounding like the admission was costing him something. “I was exiled.”

Zack blinked. That made no sense whatsoever. Milo was sweet, kind, and heroic. If the Jedi Council thought that he could do something worth exiling, then they were _delusional._ “Why were you exiled?”

Milo was silent for a very long time. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said at last. Zack nodded. He wouldn’t press Milo. If Milo wanted to talk about it, he would do so on his terms. And if he never wanted to talk about it, that was fine with Zack too.

“All right, well, if I’m not going to get the juicy details, then let’s start getting out of here. And fast too, just in case Norman somehow recovers from this.”

They fought their way to the terminal that controlled the airlock. There were advanced and even deadlier mining droids in their way, but they didn’t stand a chance. Between Milo’s unique power and Zack’s mining lasers, they barely even slowed the duo down.

“You think you can slice through this thing? Norman seemed pretty confident that only he could unlock it.”

“Yeah, and I bet he was confident that you wouldn’t chop his head off too,” Zack retorted. “I got this. I can slice through anything.”

Zack was true to his word. It took him less than one minute to slice through Norman’s defenses, especially since those defenses had solely consisted of the password Namron, Norman spelled backwards. “Got it! The airlock door is unlocked. Let’s go!”

Thankfully, there were two spacesuits already waiting in the locker. “You mind stepping out while I get changed?” Milo asked, that beautiful blush returning to his face.

“You sure you want that?” Zack asked with a wink. “I don’t mind staying. The view is nice.”

But he was walking to the door before he had finished talking. Teasing was one thing, but he would respect Milo’s privacy, no matter how tempting taking a peak would be. When Zack changed, Milo just faced a wall. He didn’t peak either, much to Zack’s disappointment.

The vacuum of space awaited them in the distance. Only a thin ledge separated them from free falling into the infinite vastness of it. Zack was scared of a lot of things, and heights was definitely one of them. His brain was screaming at him to turn back and not walk into the vast, inky skies where he could _die._

But Milo squeezed his hand, and suddenly, that fearful part of him didn’t seem to be quite as loud as the part of him that wanted Milo to keep squeezing his hand.

And, Force be praised, maybe Milo was picking up on that somehow, because as they stepped out into the thin platform in front of them, Milo’s grip on his hand never faltered.


	3. This Was a Triumph

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A droid assassin? Milo has seen stranger. Remember the varactyl incident? Now that was strange.

Wally Tate, captain of the _Harbinger,_ was having the worst month of his life, and it probably wouldn’t have comforted him any if he had known that it would also be his last.

The funny thing is that at the beginning of that month, he had been in high spirits. After all, they had gotten a direct mission from the chancellor himself, and everyone knew that Chancellor Fletcher was an extraordinarily generous man to those who demonstrated competence. Captain Tate thought that he was too young to be ruling a galaxy – he was the youngest chancellor ever elected – but there was no doubt that he had the intelligence and charisma needed to accomplish the task.

And there was certainly a lot that needed accomplishing. The Mandalorian Wars had been damaging enough to the Republic, but the Jedi Civil War had simply _gutted_ its infrastructure. He had heard people speculate that if the Republic continued on the path it was on now, it would collapse under its own weight within a year. Captain Tate disagreed.

He was certain that the Republic was lucky if it had half a year left. It wasn’t just an infrastructure problem. No one _believed_ in the Republic anymore, and government is always, always dependent upon belief.

Chancellor Fletcher was certain that restoring the Jedi Order under the right person could reverse the slide long enough to stabilize the Republic, but Captain Tate wasn’t so sure. He certainly wasn’t sure that Milo Murphy was that person. He had expected a great warrior, but if Milo was a great warrior, then Captain Tate was a krayt dragon.

It wasn’t that Milo was a bad person. To the contrary, he had been a ray of sunshine, smiling and cheerful, with kind words for everyone. But he just didn’t have what it _took_ to save the galaxy from itself. If it was just a question of restoring hope, Milo could do that. He exuded confidence and joy from every pore of his being. But the Jedi were not just about hope. They were about making tough decisions. They were the Republic’s cortosis fist in a velvet glove, and that didn’t describe Milo at all.

And then there were the accidents. He knew that Milo wasn’t directly involved in them. Security footage had conclusively proven that. But according to Chancellor Fletcher, they were his fault anyway, because of some Force effect known as “Murphy’s Law.” Captain Tate wasn’t sure what to make of that – like most people in the galaxy, the Force was a closed book to him – and it wasn’t any of his business anyway. But whatever it was, it had been wreaking havoc all over the ship. Anything that could go wrong _was_ going wrong, and it was a miracle that the vessel was still _spaceworthy_ by the time it showed up in Peragus to refuel.

They hadn’t even _needed_ to refuel beforehand, but there was a leak in the fuel intake valve, and by the time it had been repaired, they had lost so much fuel that they wouldn’t have been able to make it to Telos.

And the accidents had gotten more frequent in the past week. If it weren’t for his new protocol droid, a really pleasant and jovial one that called itself Norman, Captain Tate had thought he might lose his mind. Thank goodness that he had someone trustworthy to look into these matters.

Things had gotten even stranger aboard the Harbinger, and he hadn’t even been sure that was possible, when they had been abruptly ejected from hyperspace by means of a gravity well projector. A projector of such strength was only found on warships comparable to the _Harbinger_ , and one of them had been waiting for them. Not a Republic warship, but a Sith warship known as the _Devastator,_ a warship that was believed to have been destroyed during the Battle for the Star Forge.

It was a ghost from the past, but Captain Tate was afraid of no ghosts. That was, in the end, his fatal mistake. They had found almost no one. It was as if ghosts themselves were crewing the ship, though that was patently preposterous.

The only exception was on the bridge, a single plant-based lifeform. It resembled a humanoid pistachio plant and looked dead. The Republic troops had taken it to the medbay for observation. Perhaps this creature was one of those mysterious Pistachions that the spooks in Intelligence had been going on about. If so, all the more reason to deliver it to Telos, and let it be someone else’s problem.

And to make matters even stranger, a heavily damaged freighter had limped its way into the cargo hold. It contained an unconscious man and a young woman who carried herself like a queen, despite her ragged clothes. The woman had invoked diplomatic immunity and then refused to say a single word to Captain Tate.

On the day he died, very close to his end, Captain Tate was on the bridge of his vessel, staring out into the void of hyperspace. He enjoyed doing that. It was relaxing, and as such, he sometimes let his guard down when doing so. This was one of those times, and he didn’t see his lieutenant, a man who had served alongside him for twelve years, fire a blaster bolt into his leg until it was too late.

It was like something out of a nightmare. Everyone on the bridge had turned against him. They were all pointing blasters at his head. And then their human forms melted away to reveal that inside what appeared to be flesh suits were Pistachions.

The seemingly dead Pistachion walked onto the bridge, alive and unharmed. There was a sadistic smile on his face, and a lightsaber in his left hand. Captain Tate expected the blade to be red when ignited, but it wasn’t. It was completely black, not like the blackness of space, but like the blackness of a black hole. It was as if the blade was _beyond_ black, and the only way that it could be expressed in the human mind was to simulate black.

“You stand, foolish human, before the galaxy’s rightful ruler, Darth Pistachion,” Darth Pistachion announced in a surprisingly soft voice. “Your death is at hand, but if you kneel before me, I will let you decide how you die.”

Captain Tate spat in the Sith Lord’s face. Darth Pistachion was likely right about him losing his life, but he would not lose his honor.

Darth Pistachion nodded at one of the Pistachions who had been impersonating his crew, who reached out and grabbed Captain Tate by the throat and started squeezing. “You should not have defied me, mate. Agonies will be visited upon you. You can’t even _imagine_ the ways that I’m going to hurt you. But I am ever merciful,” he said with a wink. “Tell me everything I need to know about Milo Murphy, and your death will only last for days instead of weeks.”

“What…you need to know…” Captain Tate said, and then he coughed up blood. “All right, I’ll tell you…if you grant me one last request…”

Darth Pistachion gestured at his minion, who let go of Captain Tate’s neck. “And what does the turncoat want? Gold? Silver? Emeralds?”

“All I want is to die with honor. Make it quick and look it in the eye as you kill me.”

Darth Pistachion strode over to him, an amused glint in his eyes. “Oh, is that all? I assure you, captain, I was planning on doing that anyway. Well, not the quick part. The looking you in the eye part,” and then he yelped as Captain Tate headbutted him.

Taking advantage of the brief distraction, Captain Tate grabbed the lightsaber out of Darth Pistachion’s hands and pointed it at his throat. “Everyone drop your weapons or your leader gets it!”

“The first one to break formation goes out the window,” Darth Pistachion warned his men. “You really think you can get out of this? You are completely surrounded. Even if you can kill me, and I assure you that you cannot, my men will ensure that your death lasts for _years.”_

Captain Tate regretted a lot of things in the last moment of his life. He regretted that he would never see his beloved wife or his homeworld ever again. He regretted that he had never ended up having children like he always wanted to. He regretted that he could not save his crew.

But the decision to take the lightsaber and plunge it into his own heart was not one of those things.

He had to take the risk. Chancellor Fletcher believed that Milo Murphy could save the galaxy. And if he had to choose dying in the service of that belief and dying for absolutely no reason at all, he would choose dying for Milo every single time.

*****

Milo loved space. He loved it almost as much as he loved cheese fries (they were _fries_ with _cheese,_ for the Force’s sake), maybe even more. He had been ten when he had first left Coruscant on the Gathering, and had gotten the crystal that had gone into his lightsaber. He never knew that there could be something so beautiful. Where some saw the infinite inky blackness as oppressive, even terrifying, Milo saw nothing but wonder.

When he was a kid, he had dreamed about being the first one to visit every planet in the universe. He wanted to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one had ever gone before.

And while he certainly hadn’t explored _every_ planet in the universe, he was definitely living out his dream of exploring new places. He had gone further into the Unknown Regions than any Republic navigator had before.

Basically, Milo should have been having the time of his life, walking on a thin catwalk outside the surface of an asteroid, with space in every direction. It was therefore somewhat puzzling that he instead felt an overwhelming sense of horror. He turned to ask Zack if he felt that horrible force, and…

_Oh._

It was Zack. Zack was the source of all that fear. He was on his hands and knees, completely unable to move, he was so afraid. It was rolling off of him, a thick cloud of suffocating terror that was completely paralyzing him.

Milo knelt down and touched Zack’s helmet with the hand of his spacesuit. “Zack? Can you hear me? Zack Underwood, it’s Milo Murphy. Are you in there? It’s okay. I’m here. I’m not going to let you fall.”

There was dead silence for a while. And then just when Milo was starting to become seriously concerned that Zack had had a stroke or something, he said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”

Milo blinked. “Um, why? I don’t get it.”

“Because I’m such a coward!” Zack spat, filled with hatred, not for Milo, but for himself. “Our _lives_ are at stake, and I can’t even _move_ I’m so scared. I’m…I’m a fraud. I act like I know what I’m doing but…I’m so scared. Not just now! All the time.”

Milo maneuvered Zack so that he was sitting down. Zack didn’t resist. “Hey, man, I’m scared too.”

Zack looked skeptical. “Come on, Milo. You expect me to believe that? You faced down that assassin droid without breaking a sweat. I don’t think it’s possible for you to be scared of anything.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” Milo said. “I’m scared of losing _you,_ Zack. I know we just met, but you mean a lot to me. I know how scared you are – I can feel your emotions through the Force. I can help take some of that fear away from you, but only if you trust me. Do you trust me?”

Zack nodded without a second of hesitation. “Good!” Milo said, ignoring the joy in his heart that he felt from hearing that. For now, anyway. “Now I want you to concentrate only on your breathing. Feel the breath go from your lungs and into your body. In…and out. In…and out.”

This is the point in many stories where the power of Milo’s love, the connection that they felt between each other, would have conquered Zack’s fear and allowed him to make their way to the facility with no difficulty whatsoever. That’s not what happened here, though. The meditative state that Zack was being placed in, and the connection that Milo was opening between their minds took away just enough of the paralyzing fear to enable Zack to half-crawl, half be carried to safety.

It was a close thing too. At one point, he fell off the ledge and into the infinite vastness of space. It was a moment that would haunt Milo’s dreams for the rest of his life. Fortunately, he was able to telekinetically bring Zack back up to safety. Milo was completely overwhelmed with relief, and Zack was nearly hyperventilating with terror.

And that was why neither of them noticed when the _Harbinger_ docked at the facility, bringing with it a cargo that bore infinite malice and was keen on delivering far more painful deaths than a fall into space would have ever delivered.

*****

Zack was amazed that he was alive. No, more than that. He was flat out astonished. Without Milo’s help, he would have suffocated when the oxygen in his spacesuit run out. It would have been an excruciating way to die. And Milo didn’t even seem to _want_ anything in return. Pretty much everyone he knew would have asked for at least a kiss in return, and probably much more. He would have been more than happy to give it to Milo too.

But Milo helped people because he _could._ And the idea of not helping people was just incomprehensible to him. It was then that Zack decided that the Jedi could all go kriff themselves. They weren’t _worthy_ of Milo. No one was, certainly not him.

“Are you going to be okay, Zack?” Milo asked him once they had changed back into their regular clothing. “We can wait here if you want. I’ll stop any droids from coming in this room, I promise.”

“I’ll be fine,” Zack assured him. When Milo shot him an unconvinced look, he added, “I think getting some walking done on solid ground will do me some good.”

Milo nodded, still not looking entirely convinced. “What you said back there…that you were a coward…I don’t believe it.”

Zack stared at him. “You don’t _believe it?_ Milo, you saw how scared I was! I was petrified. How can you say that?”

“Because if you were a coward, you wouldn’t have gone forward. You would have gone _back_ and left me. You would have saved yourself. You’re a much better person than you think you are.”

Zack probably would have grabbed Milo and kissed the hell out of him (and then probably gone much farther than that) if two advanced mining droids hadn’t entered the room and started blasting away.

“WE’RE HAVING A HEART-TO-HEART HERE, YOU JERKS!” Milo shouted and used his connection to Murphy’s Law to rip them to shreds. But by the time the droids were destroyed, the moment was gone. A pity too. It was a hell of a moment.

*****

Milo had been hoping that some of the miners had survived the purge that Norman had brought to the facility, but his hopes were for naught. All of them were dead, poisoned by the assassin droid. Even Max was dead, shot through the back of the head with a mining laser by Norman himself, according to security footage that Milo found just before they stepped in the turbolift leading back to the administration level.

“Look, Milo, I need to tell you something,” Zack said, looking like it was hurting him greatly to say the words he was saying. “I kind of lied about Max. And why I ended up in prison. The truth is…we were friends once. We served in the war together,” and was that guilt on Zack’s face? No, it had to have been Milo’s imagination. “And he got me this job here. But when he started talking about selling you to the Society of the Dragon…it was too much for me. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of… _selling_ people like they’re cattle isn’t one of them. So he framed me and got me locked up.”

Milo was confused. “Why didn’t you just tell me this from the start?”

“Because I didn’t want you to hate me! At first, I was trying to manipulate you, but now…Milo, I’ve really grown to care about you. In fact, I’m starting to think that –”

The turbolift door opened and Norman stood before them with a pair of mining lasers in his hands. “Am I interrupting?!” he asked, his voice now sounding like a demented version of Milo’s own.

“Um…yeah,” Zack said. “You kind of are, man.”

“Well, the good news is that I am incapable of caring!” Norman announced. “It took a while to reattach my head, but I’m back! Now, if you’d care to come with me, the Voivode of the Society of the Dragon wants to speak to you! He’s probably going to kill you, but I don’t care about that either!”

Milo crossed his arms. “Just why should I go _anywhere_ with you?”

Norman pointed the mining lasers at Zack’s head. “Because I have your lover as a hostage! Don’t worry! I promise to keep him alive if you don’t resist! Of course, I can’t make any promises as to what the Voivode will do, but it’s the best offer you’ll get from me!”

Milo had no choice. He couldn’t let Zack die, so he let the assassin droid lead him away from the administration area. Maybe when they were away from the facility, they could come up with a plan to get away from him. They had to. Milo may not have been as street smart as Zack, but even he knew that when someone calling himself the Voivode of the Society of the Dragon wanted to speak to you, it wasn’t a conversation that you would survive…and that was the best case scenario.

“It may stun you to learn this,” Norman said, “but it was I who killed all the miners in this facility!”

“Yeah, I think that we figured that out already,” Zack said dryly.

“Look, Zack, if we’re going to die, then I want you to know – ”

“HEY, UGLY!”

“I think she’s talking to you!” Norman said, pointing at Zack, and then turned around just in time to get a lightsaber through the face.

“Take that!” Melissa shouted as she slashed away at Norman with a yellow lightsaber, cutting off all his limbs and then systematically chopping him into tiny little pieces. “And that! And that! Boom!”

Milo had never been happier to see a Jedi in his life, and that included during the thirteen years of his life when he had _been_ one. “Melissa! It’s so good to see you. But I thought I broke your lightsaber.”

“I fight with two lightsabers,” Melissa explained. “It’s called Jar’Kai. But I can handle one of them in a pinch.” She turned to face Zack. “Hi, I’m Melissa Chase, freelance journalist, ex-Jedi, and assassin droid slayer extraordinaire.”

“Hi, Melissa Chase,” Zack said, looking somewhat shell-shocked. “I’m Zack. Zack Underwood.”

“Well, Zack Underwood, our ride just showed up, so let’s get out of here.”

“Our ride…?” Milo asked.

Melissa blinked at him. “You seriously didn’t see the huge Republic warship that just docked at the facility?”

“I was probably too distracted by falling to my death at the time,” Zack admitted. “Milo saved me.”

Melissa punched Milo on the arm in a friendly manner. “You rescued him? Awesome! That’s what I’m talking about! Anyway, you were traveling aboard the _Harbinger_ before this business started. It’s the safest place for us.”

Milo looked over at Zack. He trusted his judgment. “Melissa’s right,” Zack said eventually. “We have to get to the _Harbinger._ Luckily, we can access it from here. Then we can burn sky until we see lines.”

Melissa and Zack started to walk in the direction of the _Harbinger,_ but Milo stopped to look over the thankfully thoroughly dismantled Norman. The Force whispered at him to take the droid’s vocabulator, and he obeyed. The Force had never let him down yet, even if the people who claimed to understand its will did.

As he jogged over to join Melissa and Zack, he felt a surge of pride in his friends. There was no threat in the universe, he knew, that they couldn’t stare down together.

If he had known the truth, he might very well have run screaming from the room. But then again, he might not have. What do I know? I’m just the author.


	4. Nuts to Peragus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Milo’s sister told him that their father once said, “When crazed Pistachions show up aboard a Republic warship to kill you, don’t underestimate their deadly killing power, especially if you have a nut allergy,” which Milo doesn’t, thank goodness.

Zack was getting really sick of dead bodies. The Peragus facility had been full of them, and it didn’t make him feel any better to learn that the _Harbinger_ was full of them too. The crew had been killed. Not merely shot or stabbed, but ripped to pieces, dismembered, and subjected to agonies that Zack shuddered to even _think_ about.

“What do you think happened here?” Milo wondered. “Norman couldn’t have gotten to these guys, too?”

Melissa sighed. “It’s not Norman, no. It’s the Pistachions. I’d recognize their handiwork anywhere. They’re sadistic maniacs whose only purpose is to bring death and destruction to the galaxy. I’ve been dodging their attacks for over a year. They must have been after me.”

“Or me,” Milo suggested.

Melissa shook her head, but there was something in her face that Zack didn’t like. Honestly, there was something about Melissa that just set all the alarm bells in his head ringing, and he wasn’t at all sure _why._ Melissa, by all appearances, was friendly, helpful, and kind. So why did he get this incredible sense of _danger_ every time he looked at her?

Maybe it was just him being overly paranoid. But then again, in the criminal underworld there was no such thing. There was only being paranoid enough and being dead.

“Okay, well, then let’s just get out of here,” Zack suggested. “I’m not getting paid enough to tangle with sadistic maniacs. I mean, I’m not getting paid at all, but you know what I mean. We planned to get to the _Ebon Hawk_ , so let’s do it.”

“There’s one problem with that,” Melissa admitted. “We need the orbital drift charts, so we don’t smash into an asteroid on our way out.”

 _And why didn’t the_ Ebon Hawk already _have those charts?_ Zack wondered, but he didn’t say anything. If Melissa had some sort of agenda in mind, it was better to let her spring her trap and deal with it then, and if she didn’t, he’d just look ridiculous for voicing his suspicions.

And he would _not_ look ridiculous in front of Milo. Not again.

He reached down and grabbed a blaster off of a dead Republic soldier. Milo looked shocked. “Zack! He’s dead! You’re seriously just going to loot his body?”

“No, no, it’s not like that,” Melissa said. “We’re all Republic citizens, right? Well, the purpose of the Republic’s army is to defend the citizens of the Republic. That would extend to its materiel as well. This man died in the service of that purpose, and we can ensure that even _after death,_ he can _still_ fulfill his oath. What greater honor could we give him than that?”

“Well, that makes sense,” Milo admitted. “But I still don’t want to see you do it.” He walked away.

Zack looked over at Melissa, impressed. “Do you really believe that?”

“Come on, man, don’t be ridiculous.”

*****

Milo felt like a third wheel as he walked through the _Harbinger’s_ eerily quiet hallways. Zack and Melissa had been talking incessantly since they had walked aboard the ship. Zack was particularly interested in learning more about Melissa’s past, and while Melissa kept on dodging question after question, he didn’t look like he was ready to relent anytime soon.

Could Zack have a crush on Melissa? He wouldn’t be surprised. Melissa and Zack seemed to be pretty similar, personality wise. They were both incredibly confident and smart people, and by the sounds of it, they had a lot of common interests.

Milo sighed and comforted himself by telling himself that he could at least be the best man at Melissa and Zack’s wedding. The idea of Zack in a tuxedo (and what it would be like if he took the tuxedo off) got him so distracted that he didn’t see the humanoid plant attack him until the first swipe of the plant’s sword nearly chopped his head off.

Milo kneed the Pistachion (because presumably that was what he was) in the groin more or less on instinct. He wasn’t really expecting it to have much effect, but it ended up causing the Pistachion to sink to his knees, which raised quite a few interesting biological questions now that Milo thought of it.

Perhaps fortunately for his sanity, there wasn’t much time to think about it. Five Pistachions were surrounding him, all wielding broadswords with runes emblazoned on the hilts. Zack blasted away with the pair of blaster pistols that he had acquired from the dead Republic soldiers.

Melissa, on the other hand, preferred to use her lightsaber. While there were elements from a couple of different styles, especially Juyo and Djem So, her primary style was Ataru. The Way of the Hawk Bat, as Ataru was sometimes known, favored swift and acrobatic movements, which Milo supposed entirely fit Melissa’s energetic nature. She cut down three Pistachions one after another, yelling “BOOM!” after each time, while Zack got the other two.

And Milo had done absolutely nothing but cower. He felt so _useless._ “Sorry, guys,” he said. “They took me by surprise.”

Melissa grabbed both his arms and spun him to face her with astonishing force. There was anger on her face, almost fury. “Don’t you _ever_ apologize for not being good at combat. Is that what the Jedi taught you? Did the great champions of peace berate you for not wanting to _kill_ things?”

“The Jedi didn’t teach me that, no,” Milo said quietly. “Mechanus did.”

Milo ignored Zack gasping behind him. He had to, if he was going to make it through this conversation. “I fought alongside him in the Mandalorian Wars. I was…I was just a kid, but he said that if I was to participate in his movement, I had to fight. It was my destiny. But I hated it. Every moment of it.” His hand was shaking. Oh, God, he was losing control, _here,_ in front of _Zack_ of all people.”

Zack squeezed his hand. “It’s okay, Milo. You’re here now, and you’re safe.”

“Yeah, anyone wanting to mess with you, they’re messing with us now!” Melissa said triumphantly, waving around her lightsaber for emphasis, slicing a chunk off of the ceiling in the process. She yelped and deactivated the lightsaber. “I thought I had this thing turned off…”

*****

Even though Milo continued to insist that he was fine, Zack thought that he could at least use a chance to sit down and get his bearings for a while, preferably somewhere that wasn’t strewn with corpses. Zack had been around enough soldiers in his time to know _exactly_ what was going on inside Milo’s head. 

It made sense now. Nobody could be as perky as Milo was 100% of the time when they led the life he did. It wasn’t possible. Oh, sure, Zack was certain it wasn’t _all_ an act, or even most an act, at least on a conscious level. But Milo’s peppy attitude was his coping strategy. And it seemed to be working well. At least most of the time.

It took a fair bit of wrong turns and several Pistachion ambushes that thankfully didn’t seem to cause Milo’s mental state to deteriorate any further, but they finally found the command staff’s conference room and its incredibly comfy leather chairs. Milo sat down in one of them and was out like a light, instantly fast asleep.

Melissa agreed to stand guard outside the room to make sure that Pistachions didn’t get inside. While she was busy with that, Zack busied himself with slicing into the holoterminal. Knowledge was power, after all, and Zack wasn’t above selling Republic secrets to the highest bidder if it meant that he could get the credits needed to protect himself and Milo.

Huh. He had never tacked anyone’s name onto “protect himself” before. No one had ever been important enough for him to need to do that.

Most of the records were simple enough to slice through, but there was one extra level with a _huge_ amount of security, one of the most Zack had ever seen. But Zack hadn’t been bluffing when he said that he could slice through anything. High level Republic encryption wasn’t exactly in the same league as a security terminal in the mining facility – it was almost infinitely more complicated – but all systems worked along the same principles in the end, and almost an hour later, Zack was rewarded with a hologram of the _Harbinger’s_ captain appearing in front of him.

 _“In accordance with your orders, Your Excellency, we picked up the Jedi on Lehon,”_ the captain said, looking like he was trying very hard not to let slip just how dumb he was thinking his orders were. He was talking to someone through a holographic projector. Zack only recognized this because he had seen that expression on his own face often enough. _“He…doesn’t exactly seem very impressive.”_

The man who he was speaking to appeared before him, and Zack gasped. He recognized the man instantly. There probably wasn’t anyone in the galaxy, even Milo, who wouldn’t recognize the man. He was certainly memorable, what with his rectangular, F-shaped head, his green hair, and his stoic, completely expressionless face.

Ferb Fletcher had been a hero of the Jedi Civil War. A mere officer in the Republic fleet, he had fought alongside Phineas Flynn in the epic battle that had brought down Mechanus. Soon afterwards, he had been elected senator to Coruscant by a greater margin than any previous Coruscanti senator. When Chancellor Contraction had succumbed to a stroke, Fletcher had been elected to replace him. He was the youngest chancellor in over ten thousand years.

And for some reason, he had an interest in Milo.

 _“Neither do I,”_ Fletcher pointed out. _“Mr. Murphy has his own set of unique talents. He suffers from an affliction apparently known as Murphy’s Law. The laws of probability tend to bend around him for the worse. Some scientists have speculated that his midi-chlorians attract negative probability ions, but I myself think –”_

The holographic projector burst into flames, undoubtedly thanks to Murphy’s Law. Thankfully, the sprinkler system was still working and doused the fire, at the cost of drenching Milo and Zack with water. Milo woke up with a start. “Huh? What’s happening?”

“We’re having a minor equipment malfunction, nothing to worry about!” Zack said. “Hey, Milo, can you think of a reason why the chancellor wants to talk to you?”

Milo looked as bewildered as Zack felt. “No. Why would he want to talk to _me?_ I’m really not that interesting.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t underestimate yourself, Milo,” Zack said, his lips twitching.

*****

Milo always felt better after a nap, and this was no exception. Being awakened by something going wrong, well, that didn’t hurt either. It was a comforting, familiar thing, the equivalent of finding traffic in a big city to be soothing. Although Milo was still wet from the sprinklers, on the bright side, Zack was _also_ still wet, and that meant that Zack’s already tight shirt was showing off his impressive abs with more detail than ever before, and Milo was _so_ not complaining.

All in all, he was feeling much more like his usual peppy self. He tried to apologize for flaking out on Melissa and Zack as they entered the bridge, but they wouldn’t hear a word of it. “If you wouldn’t get angry with me for freaking out, why should I get angry with you?” Zack said. Milo hadn’t thought about it that way.

It took Zack only a few minutes to slice into the navigation console and download the star charts. “I guess they figured that anyone might need these at a moment’s notice,” Zack speculated.

“Good work, Zack,” Melissa said. “High five, right now!” Zack looked surprised, but gave her a high five anyway. “Okay, so I think our best move is sneaking back into the facility through the fuel line. It’s the last thing they’ll suspect.”

Neither Milo nor Zack could find any reason to object, so they started making their way to the console that would open the valve to the fuel line.

On their way there, they passed through the crew and passenger quarters. Though Milo held out hope that someone had managed to survive locked in their cabin, but he had found nothing but stacks of corpses, and after a while, he stopped checking.

Until he reached one perfectly normal looking cabin, and yet one that the Force was screaming at him was important. He stopped in his tracks and opened the door. He braced himself for some sort of slobbering monster, but he found something even more surprising in the room’s sole footlocker as he searched through it: A plain onyx box. But not just any box.

It was _his_ box, which he always took with him wherever he went. It contained one of the most precious objects in the universe to him, something greater than any gemstone.

It contained a length of hair.

The hair that he had placed in a braid when he had been a padawan. The hair that he had kept in a braid when his master joined the Jedi Crusaders, taking Milo with her. The braid that had been forcibly cut off of him when he had been expelled from the Jedi Order. Sara had somehow managed to steal it straight from the Council chamber, and give it back to him; he was never sure how.

And as if summoned by the thought of his sister, memories started flooding back to him. He had been interviewing some of the last remaining members of the Rakata civilization about the vast interstellar empire that they had overseen a score of millennia ago when a message had appeared on his datapad. A message from Sara, begging him for help. It was life or death, she had told him, and he needed to get to Telos as soon as possible. Fortunately, the _Harbinger_ had been close by and he had negotiated with the captain to escort him to Telos.

“I remember now!” Milo said, his voice registering a strange combination of glee and fear. “I remember why I’m here. It’s because of Sara, my sister. She needed my help. She’s in danger!”

“We’re going to provide her with all the help she needs, I swear by the Force,” Melissa said soothingly, “but right now _we’re_ in danger. We need to keep moving!” 

Knowing that Melissa was right, he kept moving. They were almost to their destination when a door opened in front of them, and a Pistachion that looked much larger and bulkier than the foot soldiers that they had fought stood before them. He pulled out a lightsaber with an obsidian hilt and ignited it, revealing a blade so black that it almost seemed to suck all the light out of the room.

“Milo Murphy,” the Pistachion said in a voice that, despite its casual, soft tone and high pitch, simply pulsated with fury and hatred. This being hated Milo to the core of its being, hated him with intensity that Milo could _feel_ in the Force, and Milo didn’t have the slightest clue why. “We meet at last. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Surrender, and your friends live. Refuse, and I’ll kill the girl slowly in front of you…and I’ll make _you_ kill the boy.”

Milo hesitated for a second, trying to figure out if the Pistachion’s word was good. But that was long enough for Melissa to ignite her lightsaber and start striding forward. “You’re not going to hurt my friends, you chlorophyll-loving bastard,” Melissa spat at him as she made her way through the open doorway. “Milo, run! I can handle this _poseur.”_

“Poseur?! I am _Darth Pistachion,_ you foolish girl, and –”

Melissa gestured and the door slammed shut and then locked behind her. Milo couldn’t believe it. It had happened so suddenly. He had barely even gotten the chance to know Melissa and now she was gone. Of course, Melissa wasn’t dead yet, but she probably hadn’t even become a _Padawan_ before leaving the Order, and Darth Pistachion was a _Sith Lord._ Milo remembered how terrifying Mechanus had been, and that was before he had even formally _become_ a Sith. What chance did Melissa have?

“Milo, we can’t help her now,” Zack said, breaking him out of his thoughts. “We have to save ourselves. She sacrificed herself to save us. It can’t be in vain. I won’t _let it._ Will you?”

“No, of course not,” Milo said. “I just…I hope she’ll win, Zack.”

“Yeah. So do I.”

Milo tried to not think about all the horrible things that could be happening to Melissa as he walked the long way around to the fuel valve terminal, but it was futile. His mind kept going through the various horrible fates that could await Melissa. Chopped into pieces, decapitated, strangled, stabbed through the heart. Maybe she would even –

And then, without any warning whatsoever, he was somewhere else.

*****

This is how it feels to be Milo Murphy right now:

Well, to start with, you’re not 100% certain that you _are_ Milo Murphy right now. Your body doesn’t feel like your own. As you look down at your body, you realize that there is a very simple explanation for that. Your body doesn’t feel like your own because it’s not.

Somehow, you are now in the body of Melissa Chase.

You’re sharing her mind too, and it’s…quite different from your own. Despite the energetic, almost hyper attitude that you’ve gotten to know, Melissa’s mind is one of cool, precise logic. Utter calm. There is nothing that can phase her at all. She’s taken almost every contingency into account, and the ones that she cannot, she can adjust for on the fly. Everything has been going the way she wants it to.

Everything, you presume, until now, because how could having a homicidal Sith Lord eyeing Melissa like he wants to mount her head on his wall be part of _anyone_ ’s plans?

But the calm is not what defines Melissa. It is purpose. It is _belief._ You don’t know details, but you _know_ that Melissa is driven by a cause that she considers more important than nearly anything else in the galaxy, including her own life. And you realize in a flash that while Melissa considers her _own_ life to be more important than that cause, she does not consider _yours_ to be more important. That should comfort you. It does not. 

You can’t sense Melissa’s thoughts, or move her body in ways that she doesn’t want you to, but you can feel her emotions. You can sense her total disgust at the situation, at the fact that _necessity_ has driven her to this point. You suppose that Melissa’s distaste for fighting is equivalent to your own.

“I see you have a ride along, little girl,” Darth Pistachion says. “He will not save you. Have you not learned that Murphy destroys everything he touches? You are not excluded from that.”

You sense the confusion in Melissa’s head. She doesn’t let it show on her face. She doesn’t let anything that she doesn’t want to show on her face, not at this moment. Not when what happens here, not just what she does, but what she _feels,_ what she _is_ will define the fate of the galaxy.

And it’s not just Melissa’s usual confidence talking here. Melissa _knows_ that this fight _will_ decide the fate of the galaxy. Not _could_ decide the fate of the galaxy, not _probably_ will decide the fate of the galaxy. It _will_ decide that fate.

“You talk a lot, Darth,” Melissa says, saying the name like it’s Pistachion’s first name instead of a title that has struck fear into the hearts of trillions. You don’t know why she does that, but it definitely seems to strike a nerve in the heart of the Sith Lord. “Care to back up your words with actions?”

“Gladly,” Pistachion says and surges forward.

You’re glad that you’re just a passenger in Melissa’s body right now, because if you were fighting Pistachion in your own, you’d be mincemeat within seconds. While Melissa prefers a mix of styles, Pistachion is pure Makashi. Specifically created to deal with lightsaber wielding enemies, Makashi emphasizes fluidity, precision, and economy of motion.

In other words, a true Makashi expert – and there is no doubt that whatever else he is, Darth Pistachion is a true expert – is an artist with the blade. It is not just function that matters, but form. It is about outlasting one’s opponent, about fighting them into submission with barely any effort at all. A blade wielded by a Makashi expert is like flowing water, moving through the air with an almost sinuous ease.

Darth Pistachion’s Makashi is the perfect counterbalance to Melissa’s form. Ataru has many strengths, to be sure, but one of its weaknesses is that it requires a great deal of energy, and the techniques Melissa has pilfered from the other styles just make that worse. Your arms, wielded by Melissa’s mind, put up a valiant effort. Indeed, you have lasted far longer than you foresaw you would. You meet each thrust, each sweep, each lunge, with a perfect parry.

And then with a passable parry.

And then with a barely acceptable one.

And finally, your lightsaber tumbles out of your hands and with a flourish, Darth Pistachion slices it in two, and you can feel the shock coursing through Melissa’s mind.

You expect to die, but that was just your naivety talking. Darth Pistachion is _evil,_ and he’s not going to just _kill_ someone when he can make that person suffer. “Oh, my dear child, you were a fool to think that you could win against me,” Darth Pistachion says, almost sounding regretful, almost as if he _wanted_ Melissa to win. But it’s just another way of gloating, you know.

You’re not sure if the gasp that erupts from Melissa’s throat as Darth Pistachion lifts her into the air is caused by her or you, but it doesn’t matter. You know, instinctively, that if Melissa dies in this moment, her death will be yours as well.

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Darth Pistachion goes out, his voice sounding almost seductive. “You could surrender. I will let you live…I will even let you go. Oh, yes, I can sense your skepticism, but it is true, my dear. I never lie…not when truth can hurt so much more. Your humiliation…the horror of knowing that you _lost_ and you cannot _ever_ stop me…it will be far sweeter than your blood. So choose to kneel. Or choose to die.”

And Melissa chooses to die. You feel it when it happens. Melissa’s pride simply will not allow her to bend the knee to anyone. She is ready to die. In her mind, it is a far better fate than _submitting._ She cannot show weakness to anyone, any more than she can stop breathing.

You aren’t ready to die. You have things to live for. You have _someone_ to live for, even if he doesn’t feel the same way you do about him.

So you reach out and bring forth as much of the strength that you’ve acquired over the years, a strength that you’ve fought and suffered for. A strength that you’ve bought with guilt, with blood, and with love.

And you bring all of that strength down, not upon Darth Pistachion, but upon Melissa’s mind. You would never do this under other circumstances, but you cannot let her die. You just cannot.

 _WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MILO?!_ Melissa shrieks inside your mind, inside her own, for the two are one now, her voice filled with abject horror. **_GET THE KARK OUT OF MY MIND!!!_**

If only you could. But there is no other option. Painstakingly, meticulously, you override Melissa’s control over her nerve function and force her to her knees. You are not strong enough to make her speak, but it doesn’t matter. Your actions are enough for Darth Pistachion.

“Very good, Melissa,” Darth Pistachion says, speaking like one would to a baby. “Isn’t it nice when we can all get along?”

And then he chops your left arm off with one devastating blow and walks away.

*****

Zack was starting to get _really_ worried about Milo. He had just _stopped_ in his tracks and for ten minutes, he just was completely unresponsive, just staring at the wall. It was like he was in some sort of trance. Zack dragged him towards the terminal, hoping desperately with all his heart that the person that he was probably in love with hadn’t just spontaneously become a vegetable.

He set his worries aside just for long enough to slice into the fuel valve terminal, and naturally, that was when things started getting worse.

Milo started screaming in pure agony. Zack had certainly heard those screams before on a battlefield, and in a triage center, and even in a barfight or nine, but that had been caused by physical trauma. Milo was screaming like someone had just cut his arm off.

“I’m sorry!” Milo shrieked. “Oh, Force, Melissa, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to! I had to do it! You understand, Zack, don’t you? I had to do it; it was the only way to save her life.”

“I’m sure that Melissa will understand, since you had no choice,” Zack said carefully. The wrong word could completely tear Milo apart, he knew that. “Tell me what happened.”

Milo started chanting under his breath, something about there being no death or knowledge, or something like that. A Jedi prayer, Zack presumed. It must have worked on some level, because Milo was able to start breathing deeply and then explained what had happened to him. He had done some sort of mind meld with Melissa; they had fought Darth Pistachion; and Milo had to force Melissa to kneel in order to save her life, and then, of course, that motherkriffer had cut off Melissa’s arm anyway, because these dark side types _always_ had to have the last word.

“Milo, you did what you had to do,” Zack said. “Melissa would have died otherwise. I bet you anything that when we run into her again, she’ll understand.”

“Okay,” Milo said softly. He reached up and touched Zack’s face tenderly. There was nothing in the universe Zack wanted to do more than kiss Milo right now, and nothing in the universe that could compel him to do so. Doing so when he was in this state would have been taking advantage of him.

Milo chanted under his breath for a long time, and then when he was done, he seemed to be back to his old self. “Melissa’s going to be fine. I know she is. She’s a survivor. Anyway, don’t they say that any battle you can walk away from is a victory?”

“They sure do, Milo,” Zack assured him. “Now, let’s get going. After we help your sister, we’re going to Coruscant to talk with Chancellor Fletcher. If the Republic can’t deal with this nut, I don’t know who can. Do you need to hold my hand?”

“No,” Milo said. And he smiled at Zack and in that smile was the light of every star of the galaxy. “But I want to.”

So Zack held his hand, and they walked into the fuel line side by side. And then single file when it narrowed, but those are just pesky details.

*****

Milo didn’t know what he had _ever_ done to deserve someone as kindhearted as Zack in his corner. He knew that Zack had his rough edges, and, yeah, he’d probably broken a lot of laws to know as much about slicing as he did at the very least, but there was goodness in his heart and for some reason, it was squarely directed in Milo’s direction. And he had such soft looking lips and a six-pack to _die_ for.

“You’re a good person, Zack,” Milo told him. Was his voice slurred slightly? He had taken some painkillers from a medpac that Zack was carrying around him, because darn it, his arm hurt like someone had chopped it off, but he was pretty sure that he was still in possession of his faculties. “And you’re so cute on top of that! Why are you still single, man? Is there no one in the galaxy who had the sense to snap you up?”

Zack sighed, looking irritated. “I’m not kissing you, Milo. You _cannot_ consent fully when you’re doped up like that. Tell you what; if you’re still up for it when we’re out of here, we’ll talk. In the meantime, let’s keep moving, Milo, okay?”

Zack was so wise! And so smart. If he said that it wasn’t kissing time, that was okay with Milo! Well, okay with his head. There were other parts of his body that were less okay with the idea, but Milo’s body wasn’t a committee. It was an absolute monarchy. A Miloocracy. Huh. Maybe he _was_ a bit stoned.

He’d been saying this all aloud, hadn’t he?

“Yes, you have,” Zack said. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be too upset.

“Did I ever tell you that my middle name is Danger?” Milo wondered.

It took him about an hour’s worth of walking and rambling, mostly about historical tangents and how incredibly sexy Zack looked, for the painkillers to get out of his system. “I think I’m okay now,” Milo said. “I…didn’t say anything really embarrassing, did I?”

“Nah, man, don’t worry about it. You think _I’ve_ never been stoned before? _Me?_ I know what it’s like; you say things you don’t mean to. I mean, the worst thing that you said was probably –”

“It was probably when you started singing that song about the teapot,” a voice said in front of them. Milo jumped up to the ceiling – literally to the ceiling, since he could augment his jumping skills with the Force – with surprise. “I wish I _could_ forget that, but, alas, I can forget nothing.”

Baljeet Tjinder emerged from the darkness and gave both of them a polite nod. “It’s nice of you to _finally_ remember that I was missing and to go searching for me.”

“Actually, we stumbled upon you by accident,” Milo admitted.

“That’s…that’s worse,” Baljeet said. “I mean, you do get how that’s worse, right?”

“I’m sorry, Baljeet, but we had no idea where you were. We thought you were dead.”

“Not for lack of trying from that disgrace to droidkind,” Baljeet said darkly. He turned around and Milo saw that a huge chunk was missing from the back of his head. To his shock, it wasn’t brains that were inside, but circuitry and machinery.

“You’re a _droid?”_ Zack said incredulously.

“I am a PERSON and my name is Baljeet!” Baljeet spat at him. Clearly, that was a sore spot.

“Okay, well, Baljeet, I’m Milo; we’ve spoken before, but it’s great to see you face to face. We have to get to the _Ebon Hawk_ before crazed Pistachions kill us. They’re led by a Sith Lord named Darth Pistachion, and he’s already cut Melissa’s arm off. She’s alive, but I don’t know where she is. We’ll wait for her as long as we can.”

Zack started to say something, but then decided against whatever it was. “Yeah, we will. And, um, sorry about that.” He didn’t sound very sorry, Milo had to concede. But the words were still a step in the right direction.

*****

It was almost a relief to Zack to be back to fighting mining droids after the Pistachions. Almost. Baljeet turned out to be quite a deft hand with a blaster, no doubt aided by his computerized reflexes. Zack didn’t understand why _anyone_ would build a droid that looked like a human. If more androids like Baljeet started spreading across the galaxy, how would anyone be able to tell who was a real human and who was an android?

Still, these were questions for another time. Right now, his sole priority was getting to the _Ebon Hawk_ so they could get the hell out of the deathtrap that Peragus had become. And maybe he could finally get some sleep on a bed for once, instead of having to sleep standing up in a force cage. It wasn’t that he _couldn’t_ sleep there, but it certainly didn’t compare to the comfort of a bed.

It was child’s play to go through the mining droids leading to the hangar, and even Milo seemed more open to using his power to take down the droids than he was to use it against the Pistachions.

And finally, after hours and hours of waiting and fighting and almost dying, he stood before the _Ebon Hawk._

Just about anyone in the criminal fraternity had known about the _Ebon Hawk_ before the Jedi Civil War had started. It was one of the fastest vessels in the galaxy, and it had been used to make the Kessel run in less than fifteen parsecs, a record that Zack couldn’t envision anyone ever beating.

But now everyone in the galaxy probably knew the ship, thanks to one of its most recent owners, Phineas Flynn. A soldier turned Jedi initiate, Phineas had fought alongside luminaries such as the Jedi Knight Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, Perry the Wookiee, and the current chancellor against the seemingly unending forces of Darth Mechanus, and had somehow won.

So how had it gotten into Baljeet’s hands? Had he been _built_ by Phineas? That made sense, now that Zack thought of it. Phineas, like his enemy Mechanus, had gotten a reputation as a genius inventor, though he had used his talents for good instead of evil. If anyone could have built an android like Baljeet, it was probably him.

“Zack, we got company!” Milo shouted.

Zack brought his mining laser up just as no less than twelve Pistachions appeared out of nowhere, courtesy of whatever stealth devices they were using. They were hopelessly outnumbered and probably going to die, but he refused to go out without a fight.

“I don’t suppose you can use your Murphy’s law thing to get us out of this?” Zack asked.

“No!” Milo shouted.

The Pistachions advanced on them, their broadswords in hand. Zack looked at Milo’s face. If he was going to die, at least he could die looking at something beautiful. The nearest Pistachion raised his sword over his head and started bringing it down on Zack’s head.

And then a jet of electricity arced through the air and smashed into the Pistachion. He was thrown off his feet and killed instantly.

Melissa strode into the hangar bay. Her left arm was completely gone, removed at the shoulder, but her right arm was extended and lightning was emerging from her hand. Actual _lightning._ Zack had heard rumors that some users of the dark side could shoot lightning from their hands, but he had assumed that a rumor was all it was.

Pistachion after Pistachion went down, felled by the deadly electricity that seemed to go against all natural laws, and then the four of them were alone in the hangar.

“Hey, everyone,” Melissa said completely casually, as if she hadn’t just _used the dark side_ to kill their enemies. “Baljeet! You made it. Good to see you. Fist-bump!” To Zack’s surprise, Baljeet returned the fist-bump.

“You…you’re a Sith!” Milo shouted, looking betrayed.

“I’m no more a Sith than I am a Jedi, Milo,” Melissa said softly. “This is a conversation that we need to have, but later.”

Zack nodded. Sith or Jedi or just plain weirdo, Melissa’s identity wasn’t as important as escaping. “She’s right; let’s get moving!”

Milo looked like he wanted to argue further, but instead, he just walked aboard the _Ebon Hawk,_ and the others followed him. 

*****

The _Ebon Hawk_ wasn’t going to exactly win any design awards, but in Milo’s opinion, it was comfortable and cozy, if a bit unremarkable. And it certainly was an improvement over Peragus. It reminded him of his usual spaceship, the _Provident,_ which he had unfortunately had to leave behind on Lehon.

Besides, even if it had been the ugliest ship in the history of existence, Milo probably wouldn’t have noticed. He had _trusted_ Melissa, he had even merged with her mind somehow, and she had been evil the whole time! Or at least a user of the dark side, and weren’t they the same thing? Only Sith used Force lightning. It was powered by the dark side, and the most vicious Sith Lords were masters of the art. _Mechanus_ had used Force lightning, for the Force’s sake!

That was a worry for the future, though. Zack started the ship, and flew it out of the facility. Milo felt a surge of triumph. It felt like they had been in Peragus _forever._

But their worries weren’t over. They couldn’t jump into hyperspace while they were in the asteroid field, or they’d be smashed to pieces, and the Pistachions had gotten the _Harbinger_ operational. It was shooting at them – shooting to cripple their vessel, yes, but that was just a goal. Any one of their shots could easily destroy the ship.

To make matters worse, they didn’t seem to care what _else_ they hit, as shot after shot came perilously close to the asteroids. Milo knew that if they hit one of the asteroids, the volatile fuel deposits within could destroy the facility entirely.

“Hang on, everyone!” Zack said. “I’m going to try something risky.”

And he charged the ship headfirst into the asteroid field, dodging the seemingly randomly moving asteroids with such skill and precision that if Milo didn’t know any better, he would have assumed that Zack was calling upon the Force.

“It worked!” Melissa shouted. “They’re giving up!” The _Harbinger_ was turning around, and Milo was certain that in a second, it’d withdraw its turrets and jump to hyperspace.

He was wrong. Instead of doing that, it turned to face the asteroid field and deliberately fired a blast into the asteroid closest to the facility. It exploded and with a brilliant flash, it took the Peragus mining facility, an essential part of the Republic’s infrastructure with it.

“Well,” Baljeet said as Zack jumped the _Ebon Hawk_ into hyperspace, “crap.”


	5. The End of Man's Endeavor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Milo has a pleasant chat with Melissa about the past and isn’t repressing anything at all, no way, no how.

Zack didn’t care about Peragus. As far as he was concerned, any government that had stood for over twenty millennia could take care of itself, and any galaxy spanning government that put all its eggs in a singular basket _deserved_ to fall. He had much more important fish to fry than the survival of galactic civilization. He had _Milo_ to worry about.

“I think you owe us an explanation,” Zack said to Melissa. “And if it’s not a good one, you’re going out the airlock.”

“Zack!” Milo said, sounding appalled.

Melissa didn’t look at all perturbed by the threat to asphyxiate her. “It’s okay, Milo. I don’t blame him for being suspicious. All the famous Sith Lords love the lightning trick, and because they do, the Jedi think it’s evil.” She turned to look Zack directly in the eyes. “But it’s not. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s no more evil than any other method of killing. Zack, I _saved your lives._ Do I regret having to kill to accomplish that? Of course I do. But there was no other way. How is electrocuting those Pistachions any more evil than chopping them to pieces or shooting them?”

Zack had to admit that she had a point there. “So if we ask you to leave the moment we get to Telos…”

“I’ll go and you’ll never see me again,” Melissa promised. But I urge you not to. You’ll need my help. Unless we stop them now, the Pistachions _will_ rule the galaxy, and they value nothing more than pure, unadulterated sadism. It will be a living hell for every sentient being.”

Zack turned to Baljeet. “Baljeet, you’ve been quiet for a while. What do you think?”

“Melissa is right about the threat the Pistachions pose – the Republic is in mortal danger,” Baljeet said. “If it falls, the Pistachions will be the only ones posed to step in, and they will never step out again. I don’t care if she drinks blood or tortures felinx for fun. We _need_ her.”

Milo gave Melissa a wide smile. “I trust you, Melissa. You saved our lives several times, and that makes you okay in my book.”

“So what’s our game plan here?” Zack wondered. “Look, if it were up to me, we’d hide out until someone else defeated these nuts. But I bet you guys want to take this fight to them.”

“We need to go to Coruscant,” Baljeet announced. “Chancellor Fletcher wants to talk to you, Milo, and I’m sure you can persuade him to commit the Republic’s forces to combat this threat.”

“What does he want to talk to me about?” Milo wondered. “I’m nobody special. I’m just a xenoarchaeologist.”

Baljeet shrugged. “Everyone knows the chancellor is a very taciturn individual. But he doesn’t do things cavalierly. If he wants to talk to you, it must be about something very important.” Zack didn’t know how he knew it, but he still _knew_ in the core of his being that Baljeet wasn’t telling the full truth.

How was it that the only person who was trustworthy in this crew Milo had picked up was the _smuggler?_

“We can’t go to Coruscant now,” Milo said. “My sister is in danger! Sara needs my help! We have to go to Telos.”

“Then we’re going to Telos,” Zack promised him. “Family should always come first.”

Melissa sighed. “Baljeet’s right – but I’m not going to change your mind about this, so I won’t bother trying. Milo, if we could chat in private, I’d appreciate it. Excuse me.” She walked away, looking somewhat melancholy.

“I’ve got to get to work on repairing the ship,” Baljeet said. “I have a feeling that it’s going to need a lot of repairs in the future.” Baljeet and Milo both left the cockpit, leaving Zack alone with his thoughts.

Was Milo right to trust Melissa? On the one hand, Milo was probably the sort of person who trusted just about _everyone._ He had even trusted _Zack_ , and that was an accomplishment. Zack didn’t trust people as a rule, especially himself, and he worried that Milo’s habit of trusting people would land him in trouble. Melissa had an answer for everything, and people like that, in Zack’s experience, only had those answers because they had rehearsed them in advance.

On the other hand, Milo _did_ have the Force. Presumably he had some method of sensing the dark side in an individual. Zack didn’t know much about the dark side and the light side. In his experience, the galaxy couldn’t neatly be divided into categories of good or evil. But he did know a little something about dark side practitioners. Even during his time as a Jedi, it was pretty obvious that Mechanus had been bad news. Everyone ignored that back then because he was bad news for the Mandalorians, but in retrospect, they should have paid a lot more attention.

Could a dark side user hide her true nature from everyone, including trained Force users? The idea sounded a little far-fetched, but then again, so did most things about the Force.

In the end, Zack would have to wait and see. One thing was for sure: Evil Sith infiltrator or not, he’d be keeping a very close eye on Melissa Chase.

*****

It took a great deal to freak out Milo these days. It would have to be something totally unexpected, something that would have to come out of left field and pose a unique threat to him and his new friends. For example, if he had opened a door in the central area of the _Ebon Hawk_ and found an inert droid that looked very much like Norman. 

That’d do it every time.

Milo shrieked and used the Force to run up the walls until he was hanging from the ceiling. It was a bit embarrassing, really. The last time he had done that, he had still been a Jedi. But didn’t one have a right to resort to old coping strategies when one found a potentially homicidal assassin droid in one’s closet?

“What’s going on here?” Baljeet said, running into the room. Milo jumped onto the floor, looking sheepish. “Oh, you found Norm. Yeah, Izzy didn’t exactly think it through when she lent him to me. He loves killing things almost as much as he loves baking, and he _loves_ baking. He’s good at it too.”

“Izzy?”

“It’s not important,” Baljeet said, and Milo didn’t think that he had ever disagreed with a sentence more in his life. “A friend of mine. She thought that I could use some protection on my mission. I disagreed, so I ripped crucial parts off of him and tossed them into space. He’s completely inoperable now; he can’t hurt you.”

“Why not just toss _him_ into space?” Milo wondered.

Baljeet sighed. “Because we might need him later. The parts are easy enough to acquire if we have to.”

“I have one,” Milo admitted. “I took it from Norman after Melissa killed him. You should have it.” He handed Baljeet the vocabulator.

Baljeet put it in his pocket. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, _someone_ has to keep the hyperdrive from exploding.” Milo was glad that Baljeet was that someone. He may have hid it behind a sour demeanor, but Milo knew in his heart that Baljeet would do anything to protect his fellow crew members.

Wary of encountering any more unpleasant surprises, Milo followed Melissa’s Force signature into what looked like a storage closet. She was lying cross legged on the ground, her eyes closed, presumably meditating. “Hi.”

Melissa opened her eyes, looking delighted to see him. “Milo! Thanks for joining me. And thank you for your trust. It means more to me than I can say. Sit down; let’s chat, okay?”

Milo sat down across from Melissa. “I think we need to talk about what happened when you fought Darth Pistachion. I was inside your mind…I felt everything, including you getting your arm chopped off. How is that possible?”

“Before I left the Order, I was an apprentice to the Chief Librarian,” Melissa said. “I read a lot of different texts, dating back thousands of years. In one of them, mention was made of an unusually strong Force bond, one that enabled two Jedi to fight as one during times of extreme danger. But there is a downside, as we discovered: They feel each other’s pain. And, Milo, I suspect that if one of us was killed…the other would die.”

Milo gulped. That didn’t sound good at all. “Is there some way to break this bond?”

Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know. But we need to find out. Milo, I know you didn’t continue your training in the Force after you left the Order. There’s nothing wrong with that decision, but right now, you need to get back into the game. I kept learning about the Force, and I’d like to teach you what I’ve learned.”

“No dark side techniques,” Milo warned her. “I trust you, Melissa, as I said. But the dark side can sneak up on you when you’re not looking, and all Jedi have to be wary of its temptations.”

Melissa smiled a sad smile at him. “We’re not Jedi anymore, Milo. But, yes, I agree. While the line between the light side and the dark side is thicker than the Jedi believe, only a fool would deny it exists. There are techniques that I would never, _ever_ touch, techniques rooted in pure evil. I swear not to teach you any of those. I will teach you to defend yourself and to expand your knowledge of the Force. And if you are uncomfortable with my teachings, like I said, you can just say so, and I’ll walk away.”

That sounded reasonable enough to Milo. “So what’s the first lesson that I need to learn?”

Melissa was silent for a long while, presumably formulating a lesson plan. “The first lesson is that the Force’s will is largely unknowable. We use the term dark and light sides, but the truth is that these are just words we use to pretend that we know what the Force wants. These things exist – again, only a fool would deny the dark side’s existence – but focusing on them is just inviting misinterpretation, and with it, disaster. A Force user should look to _morality_ to guide them. If an action is good, then it is of the light side; if it is evil, it is of the dark side.”

“That sounds pretty obvious to me,” Milo pointed out.

“It _sounds_ obvious, but it’s not. The Jedi became insular and focused on platitudes that it ignored the suffering of countless _millions_ who were being butchered by the Mandalorians. If people need your help and you can give it and it will help them, then helping them is _right.”_

What Melissa was saying made sense. Milo just had one problem with it: It sounded scarily similar to what Mechanus had told the Jedi as he recruited them into joining the Crusaders. Mechanus had boiled with charisma and power, and he had been hard to resist. Especially when he regaled crowds with tales of the Mandalorians’ brutality and ruthlessness, with highly specific tales of the trauma and suffering that innocent men, women, and children were facing on the Outer Rim.

And Mechanus had eventually become a Sith Lord. He had probably been serving the dark side all along, and he may or may not have known it.

“I sound like Mechanus, don’t I?” Melissa said.

Milo’s eyes widened. “Were you reading my mind?”

“No, man, I heard his speeches too,” Melissa explained. “Yeah, you’re right, he sounded a lot like I do. There’s a reason for that: When he said those things, he was right. He did a lot of evil things, especially after he became a Sith Lord. But going to defend the people of the Outer Rim? Starting the Crusade, defeating the Mandalorians? That was the right thing to do. Do you still not recognize me?”

She had asked that question before, hadn’t she? Back then, he was certain that he’d never seen Melissa before, and he would have staked everything he owned on it. Not that he actually _owned_ anything other than the clothes on his back, unless you counted the _Provident._ Force, he missed that ship. It was small, but powerful, and –

Melissa snapped her fingers in his face. “Milo! You’re zoning out on me. Try to pay attention. I’m guessing that you don’t remember me still?”

“Sorry,” Milo said. “I just can’t place you. We probably had classes together or something.”

“Or something,” Melissa agreed, and though her voice sounded cheerful, Milo could sense a wave of sadness coming off of her. “Okay, I need to rest now. Getting your arm chopped off takes a lot out of you.”

Milo started to walk out of the room, but then he turned around. “I’m sorry about controlling you back when we – when _you_ were fighting Pistachion.”

“Thanks, Milo. I appreciate that,” Melissa said, sounding surprised. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”

As he left, he thought back to Melissa’s question. _Had_ he met Melissa before? He wasn’t entirely sure. And he couldn’t tell why, but something about that sent a chill of fear running down his spine.

*****

Despite Baljeet’s complaining, the _Ebon Hawk_ was running surprisingly smoothly for a ship now housing an avatar of bad luck, in Zack’s opinion. He had been worried that it would end up spontaneously exploding or something, but then again, how did he know that it _wouldn’t?_

“We’re not going to spontaneously explode, are we?” Zack asked Milo as soon as he reentered the cockpit.

“Relax, Zack,” Milo said, his eyes bright with glee. And…was it just Zack’s imagination or were they slightly dilated too? That was a telltale sign of attraction, he knew. “We’ll be fine…but I need you to cool your jets now.”

Milo’s eyes returned back to their normal state, much to Zack’s sadness. Milo looked sad too, which was good, at least in terms of their chances. “I know that there’s an…attraction between us. I am right about that, right? Because it would be so awkward if –”

“You’re absolutely right, Milo,” Zack assured him.

“Good! _Really_ good. Anyway, like I was saying, I’d like to explore that, but…I can’t. Not now. Not with all this hanging over my head. Not with Sara in danger. It’s going to have to wait. Can you wait?”

Zack could wait until every last star in the galaxy turned cold. “Absolutely. But I wasn’t actually talking about that. I was speaking literally. This ship is not going to self-destruct or anything like that?”

“Oh!” Milo looked embarrassed. It was so cute on him. “No, no, it’ll be fine. For some reason, Murphy’s Law doesn’t work in hyperspace, and as long as we’ve got a good maintenance technician, we’re usually fine. And this is an older ship – things that are older tend to be more resistant to Murphy’s Law.”

Zack breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing he wanted was to start freaking out about potentially spontaneously exploding. Not when there were so many other things to freak out about. “Okay. And, Milo, I understand entirely about you not being ready. I’ll wait for as long as you need me to. I want things to be as great as possible between us.”

Milo walked over to him and kissed him on the forehead. It was just a gentle kiss, his lips barely even touching skin, but it still set Zack’s body afire with joy and, yes, desire. “And that’s why you’re worth waiting for,” he whispered.

_Quickly, Zack, come up with a change of topic while you still have possession of enough brain cells to do it!_

“So Melissa’s okay, then?” he asked, feeling very proud that he could come up with _any_ alternative topic to Milo’s lips or certain other parts of his body.

“Yeah, she’s cool,” Milo assured him. “Her teachings are making me a little uncomfortable, but _shouldn’t_ they make you uncomfortable? I mean, take you out of your comfort zone? She’s not evil, though. I’m 100% sure of that.”

“Then that’s good enough for me,” Zack said, not meaning a word of it. He still didn’t trust Melissa any farther than he could throw her with the Force, which, since he wasn’t Force-sensitive, meant that he didn’t trust her at all. But if she _did_ have something nefarious in mind, then the best tactic would be to lull her into a sense of complacency.

At any rate, convincing Milo that Melissa was likely a Sith infiltrator was an exercise in futility. Maybe when they got Sara out of whatever mess she was in, she could talk some sense into him. Maybe –

“Zack,” Milo said, his voice sounding quiet and fearful. “You asked me why I was exiled. And I told you I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Well, I am now. I mean, not _ready_ , but I want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable,” Zack assured him.

Milo shook his head. “I’ll never be comfortable telling you this, and it needs to be said. I was exiled because I activated the Mass Shadow Generator. I mean, Murphy’s Law did. There was a chain reaction and I ended up pressing the button on accident…” He trailed off. Zack knew that he needed to come up with something reassuring quickly, but he was stymied by the fact that he was still in shock.

The Mandalorian Wars had seemed endless, even though they had only been four years long. Then Mechanus had joined the fray. The rogue Jedi Master had gotten his nickname because he saw the galaxy as a device, as a machine. By manipulating events in specific directions, he got the machine working in the way he wanted it. And if some unfortunates got smashed in its gears, well, that was the cost of war to him.

Through victory and even deliberate defeats, Mechanus had slowly boxed the Mandalorians into a corner, bringing their battle strategy down specific paths, even though no one realized it but Mechanus, not even his soldiers.

Zack had been one of those soldiers, and he had been at the Battle of Malachor V when Mechanus’s machinations had led the Mandalorians to what seemed in hindsight to their inevitable defeat. And Milo had been there too, although he had never met. That was not very surprising; there were millions of thousands of other soldiers there.

To the untrained eye, it had seemed like defeat was what awaited the Republic at the battle immediate preceding Malachor V, but that was just what Mechanus had wanted Mandalore the Ultimate to think as he engaged him in single combat. Mechanus _always_ made his enemy think that he was winning before he defeated them. Zack had seen holofootage of the duel between Mandalore and Mechanus. Mandalore had seemed to be on the verge of killing Mechanus with the Darksaber, a black bladed lightsaber that reminded Zack somewhat of Darth Pistachion’s, when Mechanus had split his double-bladed blue lightsaber into two and overwhelmed Mandalore’s defense.

He had not begged for mercy. Zack had to admire that about the bastard, even if he had hated his guts with every ounce of feeling in his body. Nor did he receive it. Mechanus had knocked him out and then had brought him to Malachor V.

The Mandalorians were caught like a womp rat in a trap. They had no choice but to rescue their leader. Their code of “honor” demanded that they do so. It had been for naught. Mechanus had hanged, drawn, and quartered Mandalore live on the HoloNet. And then he had activated the Mass Shadow Generator. At least, that was what the propaganda had said.

If there was one thing that Mechanus loved more than outmaneuvering people, it was developing superweapons, and the Mass Shadow Generator was his greatest triumph. Zack didn’t understand the exact science behind it, but basically it created gravity fields that smashed the various ships around the planet into the planet, destroying both most of the ships of both sides, and pretty much completely obliterating everything on the planet itself.

And Milo had been the one to actually activate it, completely by accident. Murphy’s Law had killed 931,682 people, and Milo had borne every ounce of that guilt.

He had assumed that Milo had gotten kicked out because he had had a boyfriend or something inane like that. But something like that…no wonder he was so messed up.

“That must have been hard to tell me, Milo,” Zack said quietly. “I appreciate your trust, more than you know. We’ll get to Telos in a few hours. Now you get some sleep, okay? That’s an order from your captain.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Milo said, his eyes shining bright not with glee or desire, but with tears. But somehow Zack knew that, to a certain extent, they were not just tears of sorrow, but tears of joy. Joy at having someone who understood and didn’t blame him at all.

And Zack didn’t. If Milo hadn’t activated the Mass Shadow Generator by accident, someone would have done it on purpose. Zack wasn’t 100% certain about a lot of things, but he was certain about that. It had been Mechanus’s plan to kill nearly everyone at that battle from the get go, and the galaxy was better off with that bastard dead.

*****

Milo let out a sigh of contentment as he walked into the hangar bay on Citadel Station. He loved space a lot more than most people did, but there was no comparison to walking on somewhat solid ground. Of course, the ground was technically on a space station and thus was not actual ground, but you couldn’t have everything.

Just as Milo was starting to look forward to sleeping on a bed with an actual good mattress, a group of what looked like police officers stormed into the room and pointed blasters at them. “Zack?” Milo asked warily. “You don’t happen to have a price on your head that you didn’t mention?”

“Not in Republic space, no,” Zack said, looking as confused as Milo was feeling.

A short, thin cop of around Milo’s age with greasy black hair, half-moon glasses, and an annoyed expression on his face stepped forward. “I am Officer Bradley Nicholson, of the Telosian Security Force, and all of you are under arrest.”

“What?” Milo said. “That’s ridiculous! What are the charges? None of us have done anything wrong, right, guys?”

Zack laughed nervously. “Nope. I’m a really law abiding guy, anyone can tell you that.”

“You are charged with destroying the Peragus Mining Facility,” Nicholson said, his voice laced with hatred. “Your craven treachery could destroy the Republic. The end of civilization could have been caused by _you._ I hope you remember that.”

“Eh, civilization is overrated anyway, am I right?” Melissa said. “I’m alone here, aren’t I? Yeah, I figured as much.”

Nicholson’s face twitched, but before he could do anything that he might regret, Baljeet stepped forward and withdrew a datapad from his pocket. “Baljeet Tjinder, Republic Diplomatic Corps. Chancellor Fletcher has tasked me to escort Mr. Murphy to Coruscant. Given that he will refuse to do so without his compatriots, logic dictates that they must accompany him.”

One of the officers crossed the room and looked at the datapad carefully. She was of about the same age as Milo with somewhat dark skin, medium length brown hair tied back with a headband, and a cool, composed attitude about her. “It seems legitimate, Bradley,” she said. “The Galactic Constitution says that members of the RDC have priority over planetary law enforcement.”

“This could be forged,” Nicholson spat. “I’ll have to reach out to my contacts on Coruscant to be sure. Officer Lopez, I want you to get Mr. Tjinder accommodations and ensure that he doesn’t leave them. The rest of you are going into force cages! Get moving!”

Lopez gave them an apologetic smile and Baljeet allowed her to drag them away. The rest of them ended up in force cages alongside a _really_ angry looking Trandoshan. One after the other, they were dragged off and interrogated regarding the destruction of Peragus. Milo had told them everything, and none of his interrogators appeared to believe a single word he was saying. Zack, he later found out, had denied everything and claimed to have no memory of the last month, whereas Melissa had just demanded a lawyer and refused to speak until she was provided one.

One good thing about the lifestyle that he led was that he had developed the ability to sleep, relatively soundly, in just about any position, including standing up inside a forcecage, and then wake up at whatever time he wanted. The forcecage had malfunctioned several times over the course of his sleep, but he had continued sleeping soundly throughout.

At least, he did until _all_ the forcecages in the room opened, leaving the three of them stuck in a room with a Trandoshan that was frothing at the mouth with bloodlust. That was Murphy’s Law for you, Milo admitted. It was fun most of the time. But sometimes, it really sucked.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Zack said, sounding petrified. “We’re not going to hurt you…unless we really have to…”

“Look at his eyes,” Melissa said. “This guy’s been drugged. I can sense his thoughts – they’re disturbed and erratic. He may not know what he’s doing.”

“And how is that going to help us when we end up in his _STOMACH?!”_

The Trandoshan tackled Milo and knocked him to the ground, snarling like he was a wild animal instead of a sentient being. He opened his mouth to tear out Milo’s trachea out, and that was when a blaster bolt pierced the back of his head, killing him instantly.

Milo turned to look at his savior, a TSF officer with a face full of stubble, a flinty look in his eyes, and an expression of…happiness?

And before he could do anything to stop him, the officer aimed his blaster pistol at Milo’s head.


	6. Aggressive Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there’s one thing Milo has learned from his travels throughout the galaxy, it’s that you don’t get something for nothing. Still, going up against the Society of the Dragon? Seriously?

This wasn’t Zack’s first rodeo dealing with assassins, sadly enough. And an assassin was surely what the so-called TSF officer was. Not only was he pointing a blaster pistol at an unarmed prisoner, but Zack recognized the nametag on the uniform he was wearing. It had belonged to one of the officers who had been sent to arrest him. The assassin bore a strong resemblance to that officer, but up close, Zack could tell that he was an entirely different individual.

First rule: Always keep them talking. If they’re gloating or taunting you, they’re not shooting you, most of the time. Most assassins enjoy seeing their victims squirm. Oh, they _say_ that they’re in it for the money, but 99% of the time, they’re in it more for the sadism than the money. Of course, those 1% were the ones you had to worry about. But if the assassin had been one of those, he would have just overloaded their forcecages and made it look like an equipment malfunction.

“So let me guess how this ends,” Zack said. “You shoot us and make it look like lizard guy here did it? Or maybe we just got caught in the crossfire?”

“An ingenious plan, don’t you think?” the assassin sneered. “It’s not for nothing that I am considered one of the best in my field.” 

“Who are you working for anyway? The Hutts? The Pistachions? The Society of the Dragon?”

The flash of recognition and slight fear in the assassin’s eyes let Zack know that he had struck gold with that last one. The Society of the Dragon was after them again. But…hadn’t they wanted Milo _alive?_ “You know,” Zack said casually, “if you’re planning on killing Milo, they’re going to be pretty angry with you. The bounty is for a _live_ Jedi, isn’t it?”

The assassin shrugged, but that speck of fear behind his eyes was growing. Good. Zack knew from personal experience that scared people make mistakes. “They’ll be just as satisfied with his corpse. And the corpses of his friends. Enough of this!” The assassin wheeled around, aimed the blaster pistol at Zack’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Zack let out a shriek as a bolt of energy completely failed to lance through the air and splatter his brains out. Then he laughed. “You didn’t realize that you were sent to kill a Murphy, did you?”

The assassin let out a snarl, dropped the blaster pistol, and pulled out a knife. Zack closed his eyes and thus completely missed Melissa telekinetically knocking the knife out of the assassin’s hands until he heard it clattering to the ground.

At this point, a sensible individual would have fled and waited until a more opportune moment to launch another assassination attempt. The assassin instead ran at Milo with his hands outstretched, intent on wringing that gorgeous neck of his.

And that was when Zack struck.

During his time in the Jedi Civil War, Zack had been trained in the art of Teräs Käsi (or Teräskäsi as its inventors, the Palawans insisted was the right term for it). Teräs Käsi was specifically created to fight Force users, but its principles could be applied to just about anyone. The key principle of Teräs Käsi was ending a fight as decisively and quickly as possible. If you let a Force user have a moment of concentration, they could use all sorts of powers against you. If they were too busy being kicked in the groin or hit in the neck, they couldn’t.

The assassin wasn’t exactly bad at hand to hand combat, but he was clearly self-taught. His blocks were clumsy, relying on brute strength rather than redirecting Zack’s energy, and tired him out. Zack, on the other hand, tried to conserve his energy, relying on strikes that made up for what they lacked in raw power with precision and exactitude. Zack was not a strong person, physically speaking. His strength was largely in his mind and his skills.

As he reeled from a knee to the groin, Zack reflected that this fight would have been _so much_ easier if he had Force powers like Milo and Melissa.

And while he was on the subject of Melissa, wasn’t it suspicious how she was just _staring_ at the fighting, as if she was sizing them up? In fact, Zack thought that he could detect the barest hint of a smile on her face. Had she planned this?

No, the idea was ludicrous. How would Melissa have known that they were going to Telos and hired an assassin in advance? Moreover, why would she hire an assassin at all? If she wanted them dead, she could have just let the Pistachions kill them in the hangar on Peragus. Or killed them herself.

But still…something was up with her. Zack knew it in his bones.

“Look out!” Milo shouted, and Zack barely managed to dodge a move that surely would have had a much better than average chance of breaking his neck.

It was time to end this fight, once and for all. Zack took the next few punches deliberately. They didn’t stand a chance of felling him, although they sure hurt a ton. But as his superiors had once taught him, “Out of life’s school of war, what does not kill me makes me stronger.” The assassin now suspected that Zack was weakening, and he pressed his advantage, grabbing onto Zack’s throat with both hands.

That was his fatal mistake. Because since he didn’t have any hands free, he wasn’t able to hold back _Zack’s_ hands. Zack plunged his fingers into the assassin’s eyes as hard as possible. It didn’t matter how strong you were. You couldn’t build muscle on your eyelids. And no one human in the history of existence, not even the strongest Sith Lord, could ignore it when they’ve been attacked in the eyes.

As the assassin screamed in pain, Zack charged forward and slammed the assassin’s head against the wall over and over again. It wasn’t until the light in the assassin’s bleeding eyes faded that Zack released him.

And, of course, _that_ was the exact moment when the doors to the holding cells opened and a team of seven officers led by Officer Nicholson charged into the room. “Back against the wall, now!” Nicholson screamed. Zack, Milo, and Melissa backed against the wall.

“You people murdered a TSF officer,” Nicholson whispered hoarsely, his face twitching with anger. “You’re not getting out of here alive. The family of poor Officer Blunt will have their justice!”

“Uh, sir,” one of the other officers said, pointing at the assassin. “That’s not Officer Blunt.”

Another TSF officer ran into the room. “Officer Nicholson, there you are! We found Officer Blunt dead in his apartment! His uniform is missing! Someone may be trying to impersonate him!” She stopped in her tracks as she saw the dead assassin on the floor. “Oh. Case solved, I guess?”

Melissa crossed her arms. “I think we got off on the wrong foot here. How about you let us go and I forget that you _threatened to murder us?_ Or, you know, since I’m a journalist, I think that there are a lot of outlets that might be interested in the story of how you let an _assassin_ infiltrate your ranks. Am I right or am I right?” She raised her hand for a high five, but no one seemed very interested in returning it.

She turned to face Milo. “Come on, don’t tell me that you’re going to leave me hanging, Milo. Only a Sith would do something so heinous.” Milo, looking bemused, returned the high five.

Nicholson stared at her for a few seconds and then let out a cough, looking embarrassed. “Yes, well…um, it is the decision of the TSF that you are to be remanded into the custody of Diplomatic Corpsman Tjinder for him to deliver you to Coruscant in accordance with the orders of the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic.”

“Works for me,” Melissa said jauntily. “Toodles!” She walked out of the cells without even bothering to look at the man that Zack had killed. It wasn’t his first time killing, and it wouldn’t be his last, but still…to be so _cavalier_ about the matter was weird.

There was definitely something going on with Melissa and for the first time since they had met, he was completely, instead of almost completely, certain that it wasn’t just his paranoia talking.

*****

Zack had been pretty busted up from his fight with the assassin, so Milo and Melissa had rented a room with three beds at one of Citadel Station’s hotels while Zack recovered in the hospital. After he had recovered, they would begin the search for Sara. Milo had tried to call Baljeet on a commlink, and the strangest thing happened when he did: Officer Lopez answered the phone.

“Um, hi,” she said, sounding a bit tense. “This really isn’t a good time.”

“Officer Lopez?” Milo said, looking surprised. “Why are you answering Baljeet’s commlink?” There was a thump on the other side of the line, and then a shriek of feedback.

There was silence for a few moments. “He’s indisposed at the moment. We’re…coordinating matters. He’ll be ready to meet with you in the morning.”

None of this made any sense to Milo, but Officer Lopez was a lawwoman and, as such, he supposed she could be trusted. “Well, okay. Tell him to call me if he has a moment,” he said, and he hung up.

He turned to look at Melissa with a concerned face. “Do you think that we should be worried about Baljeet? Something unfortunate could be happening to him!”

“Nah, Milo,” Melissa said, and, much to Milo’s shock, she started laughing. “It sounds to me like the exact opposite.” When Milo stared at her with incomprehension, she rolled her eyes. “Baljeet and Officer Lopez are having a night to themselves, if you know what I mean.”

A night to…? OH! Milo blushed. “Ah, yeah, right. That’d explain why she had his commlink, right? Okay, well, we’ll talk to him in the morning, then. Um, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to, you know…get something to eat?”

As he scurried out of the room, he heard Melissa say behind him, “I sure hope you get past these hang-ups when you and Zack start getting it on!”

Milo could not leave the room fast enough. Despite his excuse, he wasn’t actually hungry, but he was thirsty, so he grabbed a glass of nonalcoholic moof juice from the hotel bar and settled down on a couch to watch one of his favorite holodramas, _Advantage_ , on a viewscreen. It was about a team of con artists who used their skills to take down heinous villains and bring justice.

And now that he thought about it, the team’s slicer kind of reminded him of Zack.

Milo was so deep into the show that he didn’t notice the Ithorian approaching him until he was sitting next to him. “Greetings, Milo Murphy,” he said. Milo paused the show and looked at him wearily. “I am Scott, deputy prime minister of the Ithorian delegation aboard this station. Perhaps you would care to be our leader? Ha, ha, just a little Ithorian humor. No, our leader is back on Ithor. I am in charge in his absence.”

“Hi, Scott,” Milo said. Normally, he’d be more than willing to have conversation with random strangers – you never knew what interesting things they’d have to say – but he was _really_ tired and just wanted to watch his show in peace. “Maybe we can have this discussion another time. Also, how did you know who I am?”

Scott blinked. “You are a very famous man, Milo Murphy. Everyone knows that you are…the last Jedi!”

“I’m not a Jedi. I’m just a man looking for his sister. So unless you can help me find her –”

“But we do know what has happened to her,” Scott said, and Milo did a double take. How could he possibly know that? “Miss Murphy was working for us before she departed abruptly for the planet’s surface. We can give you her exact location…if you do us some favors.”

Milo leaned back in his seat and groaned. If he had been Bob Papadokalis, the quick-witted leader of Advantage Consulting and Associates, he would have been able to figure out a way to extricate himself from this situation, gain Sarah’s location, and probably make a boat-load of credits on top of that. _Zack_ could have done it. But Milo wasn’t like them. He knew all about history and xenobiology and surviving in a wilderness, but intrigue and scheming? He didn’t know anything.

In the end, he had no choice but to say yes. “Splendid, splendid, splendid!” Scott said, rubbing his hands together in a disconcerting manner. Milo had no clue how this guy had become deputy prime minister. He smelled like a sewer and he acted like he had been living in one. “We’ll see you in the morning. Bring chocolates!”

Milo turned the show back on and tried to enjoy himself, but something was missing. What could it have been? Oh, yes. It was Zack. He knew that Zack would love watching the show with him. Milo thought about how nice it would be, sitting next to Zack, having his arm over his shoulder. And then, maybe just as they were airing the flashback that always showed up in the final act of _Advantage,_ Milo would sneak a kiss in, and…

Well, we’ll leave things there, shall we? Even fictional characters need some privacy inside their heads every once in a while.

*****

The Outer Rim was not noted for the high quality of its medical care, but Telos was a notable exception. Zack was healed from his injuries in time to join Milo for breakfast. “Baljeet and Melissa not joining us?” he asked.

Milo shrugged. “I guess not. Baljeet is probably still, you know, out on the town with Officer Lopez.” Huh. Zack didn’t see that coming, but good for him. “And I’m not sure where Melissa is. You’re okay?”

“Yep, back to my usual self,” Zack assured him.

Milo then proceeded to tell him about the visit from the Ithorian who had called himself Scott which, to the best of Zack’s knowledge, wasn’t exactly a typical Ithorian name. Zack wasn’t quite as dismayed by the prospect of having to jump through as Milo was to get the information they were looking for, though. In his experience, there was no such thing as a free lunch. If they had just been handed the information, it would have almost certainly been a trap. But having to pay for it with favors made it more likely to be legit.

As the two of them dug into a delicious breakfast, Zack’s thoughts started turning towards what would happen once they’d rescued Sarah from whatever horrible situation he was in. Zack was _not_ used to real relationships. Yeah, he’d had a boyfriend and a girlfriend during his teenage years on Alderaan, but once he had joined the Republic military, his relationships mostly consisted of the one night stand kind. And that was simply not something he was willing to entertain.

He didn’t just _want_ Milo, he wanted to spend time with Milo, to see his smiling, beautiful face every time he woke up, to become not just his lover, but his best friend. If his so-called friends back on Nar Shaddaa could listen to his thoughts now, they’d deride him as weak. But Zack didn’t care. He –

“Zack!” Milo said, sounded slightly irritated. It was probably not the first time he’d said it. “Are you listening to me?”

“Uh, no, sorry,” Zack admitted. “What were you saying?”

“I’m saying that Melissa just walked in. And she looks angry!”

Angry was something of an understatement. Melissa looked absolutely incandescent with fury as she charged towards their table. “I’m going to kark those karking karkers with a karking _styptic pencil!!!”_ she shouted at the top of her lungs. Were her eyes yellow? Oh, poodoo, they were! Zack had to deescalate the situation _now,_ before Melissa killed someone.

“We’ll kick their kriffing asses,” Zack promised her. “But you’ve got to tell us what’s wrong first. Did someone hurt you? Because if they did, they’re going down.”

“Yeah,” Milo said, thankfully following his lead. “We’re a team now! You mess with one of us, you’re messing with all of us!”

Success! Melissa’s eyes were back to their usual blue shade, although the look of pure fury on her face had barely cooled. A furious Melissa he could handle though. A dark sided one, not so much, not with Milo at the table with him. “It’s Baljeet. Turns out that he didn’t get lucky with Officer Lopez after all…because there _is_ no Officer Lopez! The damn TSF let _another_ infiltrator into their ranks! And she kidnapped him and took the _Hawk_ with her! We have no ship, our friend is gone, and that useless phony Officer Nicholson isn’t lifting a _finger_ to help.”

“Maybe we should try going over his head,” Milo suggested.

Melissa shook her head. “It’d be useless. Apparently, Lieutenant Block is away attending his daughter’s wedding. Anyway, I think we’ve had quite enough of dealing with the cops, am I right?” For once, Zack had no reservations about agreeing with Melissa, nodding fervently. Even if the TSF had been paragons of integrity and competence, Zack still had a list of criminal violations as long as his arm.

“I guess our only hope now is the Ithorians,” Zack suggested, and briefed Melissa on their upcoming meeting. “Even if they can’t help us rescue Baljeet, maybe they can get us another ship. Once we get to Coruscant – after finding Sara, Milo; I promised you – he’ll be the chancellor’s problem.”

Melissa nodded. “Well, then let me get some breakfast. The sooner we’re done eating, the sooner we’ll be to our goal.”

*****

Milo was worried and he didn’t like it. It was an emotion he didn’t often experience. He never worried for himself – after all, if he did, he would never have time to feel happy, there was so much to potentially worry about – but the moment someone he loved was put into danger, he started making up for lost time.

Sara could be facing all sorts of horror down on the surface. She could already be _dead_ , although Milo suspected that he would be able to sense it if she was. And the only sentients who had information regarding her whereabouts wanted Milo to do him a favor first! It was ridiculous!

Jedi didn’t have families, for the most part. There were exceptions, naturally, but most Jedi were brought into the order as infants and never got to know any of their family. During his early years at the Temple, he never thought that he’d end up being an exception to that rule. But life has a way of surprising you sometimes.

He was six years old when he first met his sister. Their parents had been killed in one of the first skirmishes of the Mandalorian Wars, quite some time before the war had formally begun, and it had been their last request that Sara would go to the Jedi Temple and look after Milo. Sara had told him all about Murphy’s Law. Before he had learned about his blessing, Milo had assumed – as had all of his teachers – that he had subconsciously used the Force to create the havoc constantly going on in his life.

Sara had taken on a job as a mechanic at the Temple, lying about her age and species to convince the Jedi that she could handle the job, and for the next five years, he had been one of his only friends in the Temple. Then his master had informed Milo that she was joining the Crusaders, and she wanted Milo to join her.

It was the worst mistake in his life, but he had joined the Crusaders. And Sara had followed him, somehow finagling her way into a position on the _Ravager_ alongside Milo, lying about her age once more. It had been the two worst years of his life, but Milo knew that it would have been infinitely worse if Sara had not been beside him.

After the horror that enveloped Malachor after the Mass Shadow Generator had been activated, Milo had wanted to withdraw from…everything, really. Everything _hurt._ The voices and faces of the soldiers who had died on Malachor haunted his dreams. And they still did, at times. Sara hadn’t fixed everything within him. She couldn’t fix _anything_ within him. But she could give him the strength needed to start fixing _himself._

Who knows? Maybe without that strength, he would have cut himself off from the Force entirely. The idea was unfathomable to Milo now, but he knows that he would have done it then if it were not for Sara.

“And that,” he said, after explaining all of this to Scott, “is why I need to find her. Hiding her location from me is a real jerk move, and you should be ashamed of yourself! She’s in horrible danger, and – ”

“Danger?” Scott said, looking horrified. “You never mentioned that she’s in danger! Are you sure about this? When I spoke to her this morning, she told me that everything is fine.”

Melissa put her hands up, looking disturbed. “Wait a second. You _spoke_ to her?”

“Well, yes,” Scott said. “I told her that you’d been looking for her. She’s looking forward to speaking to you, but she’s in the middle of a time sensitive matter and cannot leave her post on the planet’s surface at this time.” He looked at Milo plaintively. “Mr. Murphy, I assure you, if I believed that your sister’s life was truly in danger, I would give you her location right this moment.”

“Holograms can be faked,” Zack pointed out.

“And so can datapad messages,” Melissa retorted darkly. “Someone wants us on a wild goose chase. We shouldn’t _be_ here. We should be on _Coruscant.”_

Milo shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere until Sara can assure me in person that she’s fine. And don’t forget about Baljeet! We have to find him! So tell us what you want me to do?”

Scott went on a long rant, filled with tangents that I, as your benevolent narrator, have deemed to be unnecessary to print here. The long and the short of it was this: The Ithorians had been running the restoration planet to heal the planet from the orbital bombardment it had suffered during the Jedi Civil War, and everything had been going swimmingly until the Czerka Corporation had swooped onto the station, bent on seizing control of the operation for themselves. Though Chancellor Fletcher favored keeping on the Ithorians, a worryingly significant portion of the Senate – not _quite_ a majority, but very, very close – wanted to have Czerka take over the project.

And wouldn’t you know it, but the moment Czerka had popped up on the station, things had started going wrong in the restoration zone on the planet’s surface, in a thousand minor ways and quite a few major ones. There was no _proof_ that it was sabotage, but nothing else, short of a Murphy’s presence (and since the blessing only affected Murphys with a Y chromosome, Sara was not responsible) could logically account for such things.

Fortunately, the Ithorians had acquired a lead on the sabotage. According to an informant within Czerka, they had forged an agreement with the local branch of the Society of the Dragon, operating under the front company Havaselve Enterprises.

What Scott was asking Milo to do was disrupt that agreement somehow and convince the Society to back off. That wouldn’t be easy. Telos’s boyar (or leader of the local branch of the Society) was a man calling himself Mr. Smith, but had received the nickname Dr. Not Sorry because of the sinister scientific experiments he ran…and his total lack of remorse for the deaths that it had caused. Not a reasonable fellow, in other words.

“Help us, Milo Murphy,” Scott concluded. “You’re our only hope! Aside from, I don’t know, a sudden spontaneous attack of conscience from Boyar Smith? That’d probably do it, now that I think about it. You’re our _most likely_ hope, then!” Milo saw that Zack was barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes, and Melissa wasn’t even bothering to restrain herself at all.

“And you promise to give us the location if we help you?” Milo asked. “No tricks? And we’ll need a ship too.”

“I so swear it,” Scott said, sounding much more solemn than he did until now. “May all of Trinta’s demons burn my flesh should I break my solemn oath.”

That was that, then. Milo had never heard of an Ithorian breaking _that_ oath. Scott meant what he said. He would fulfill his end.

Now the only question was how Milo would fulfill his own side of the oath without getting killed.

*****

Sentients, Zack knew, were the same throughout the galaxy. Oh, yes, their appearances and activities and traditions were vastly varying, but their _nature_ remained the same. They _always_ settled into patterns, even if they were isolated and deprived of contact from the rest of the galaxy. It didn’t matter if you were human or Iktotchi or Mon Calamari or Kaleesh. Nothing could change the nature of a sentient.

Telos may not have been exactly as disreputable a location as Tatooine, but it had a criminal underbelly all the same, and criminals _always_ congregated at the local cantina. It was just one of the cardinal rules of the universe.

Which is why Zack brought Milo down to the local cantina. Well, cantina was perhaps an unkind word for the place. It was a bar, fairly upscale too. It was a good thing that Zack’s most recent job just before he met Milo had netted him a ton of credits (and a commensurate price on his head in Hutt space, which had forced him to hide out in Peragus until the heat died down), because the drinks for sale were far more expensive than they should be.

With Melissa safely out of the way on a monkey-lizard chase to interrogate various members of the TSF regarding “Officer” Lopez, he could focus on his twin missions at the cantina. Mission number one: Enjoy spending some time with Milo in a relaxed, convivial environment where no one was shooting at him.

“I’m not sure that we should be here, Zack,” Milo said. “Shouldn’t we be figuring out how to stop the Society?”

Ordinarily, this was the kind of comment that Zack would have been dreading Milo to say. Not this time. This was _exactly_ what he wanted Milo to be saying. “Oh, we will, once we get some drinks into us. They’re a bunch of weak-willed cowards, the Society,” he added loudly.

Aha! That got the reaction he was looking for. Mission two had been to draw out a Society member, and that was precisely what was happening. A bulky human who, despite his expensive suit, bore the Society’s telltale elaborate tattoos and looked like he could rip a man apart at a moment’s notice. The tattoos indicated the member’s status within the organization and the most noteworthy crimes he had committed. This man bore the image of a hooded executioner, indicating that he had murdered a relative, and a quincunx (a set of five dots like what one would find on a die) indicating that he had served a long prison sentence.

“Now onto phase two,” Zack said smugly, much quieter. “Milo, I want you to follow my lead, don’t act confused even if you are.”

“Okay, Zack,” Milo said placidly. “Whatever you think is best. I trust you.”

As much as Zack would have loved to focus on the feeling of glee that erupted when he heard that he had Milo’s unconditional trust, that was not possible. He had to focus entirely on defending himself. Though the public nature of the cantina and its reputable nature meant that he would likely survive the coming encounter, one could take no chances.

Zack stormed over to the man, who was eyeing Zack with murder in his eyes, and made his expression one of fury. “Don’t think I can’t see you over there making eyes at my man,” Zack spat, loud enough to be heard by the entire cantina. There was now dead silence in the room. _Jackpot,_ Zack thought.

“You must be out of your mind,” the man spat. “I want you to take that back right now, or I will see to it that the rest of your life is very, _very_ short.”

“No,” Zack drawled. “I don’t think I will, you _bitch.”_ Several people in the room gasped. Zack had just brought forth the most insulting thing you could _ever_ call a Society member: a slang term for one who collaborated with the law and sold out his fellow men.

The man snarled and there was suddenly a gleaming knife in his hands. Milo held out a hand and cracks suddenly started appearing in the knife until it disintegrated in his hand. The man’s face went pale with terror and pain from his sliced up hand. “Now, now,” Milo said chidingly. “I think that we don’t want things to go _too_ far, do we? We want to talk to your boss. We have…a business proposition for him.”

“I don’t know what sort of dark sorcery you wield, but it is no match for a blaster!” the man shouted at him. Milo gestured and the man was suddenly pinned against a wall and the blaster that he had taken out of his pocket was on the floor.

“I want you to take a message to your boss,” Zack said. “I’m not afraid of him, but he should be afraid of _us._ I have the death sentence on _five systems,_ I’ve dodged _hordes_ of bounty hunters, and if he wants to kill me and my beautiful, amazing Force-wielding boyfriend, he’ll pay the cost in _blood_. And if the next thing out of your mouth isn’t an agreement to send the message, that cost will start getting paid with _you.”_

The man nodded frantically. “ _Da!_ Yes, I will deliver the message!” 

“Let him down, Milo. And if he tries to kill me again, make his brain explode, would you?”

“You got it, sweetheart,” Milo said, and kissed Zack on the cheek. Zack felt pride. Milo was taking to acting out the role of rogue, dangerous Force-wielder like a duck took to water. He’d make a scoundrel out of Milo yet. Or at least someone who could pretend to be one.

Right after the man had left, the sound of applause reverberated throughout the room, and Zack wheeled around to face a red-skinned woman, wearing embarrassingly little, sway towards him, raw sex appeal echoing from her every pore. And Zack meant that literally: The woman was a Zeltron, and she was using her pheromones to effect the mood of the room. The only thing preventing Zack from wanting to jump her bones was the knowledge that his attraction was artificial, and while his head was still clear, other parts of his body were sending signals otherwise. Even Milo, who wasn’t attracted to women at all, had his mouth hanging open and his ears were so pink that they weren’t too far removed from the woman’s skin tone. 

“Dial down the whammy,” Zack said disapprovingly. “Think I’ve never met a Zeltron before, lady? I’m not some moron off the street.”

There wasn’t any external indication that the woman had done anything, but Milo’s face returned to its normal color and so did Zack’s own body, more or less. “Sorry about that, duckling,” the Zeltron said, not sounding sorry at all. “I’m Joni, the second in command to Doc Not Sorry. And I assure you, your message is received. Perhaps I can buy you and your hunk of a boyfriend a drink to apologize?”

“Okay, but make it a good one.”

Joni snapped her fingers and the bartender stood to attention as if he was a soldier and Joni was his superior officer, which was probably close to the truth. She ordered a bottle of a wine that Zack recognized as being very rare, and very expensive. “On the house, Mr. Underwood.”

They waited until the wine had been delivered. “To your continued health, and to the profitability of our respective enterprises,” Joni said as the toast, sounding surprisingly formal.

Zack hesitated for a second before drinking, but he figured that if Joni was going to poison him, she wouldn’t waste such a rare vintage on it. He repeated the toast and they all clinked glasses.

“We represent the Ithorian delegation,” Zack said. “We want you to end your association with the Czerka Corporation, and cease all sabotage of the Telosian restoration project. In return, the Society of the Dragon will receive…nothing.”

Joni raised an eyebrow almost as black as the blade of Darth Pistachion’s lightsaber. “Such a bold request. You’re asking us to give up our dealings with a respected business partner for no gain whatsoever. I’m curious as to why I shouldn’t have you shot where you stand for such insolence.”

“Well, for starters, because Milo would snap your neck before you could even get the order out. He was trained as a Dark Jedi, you know,” Zack said, taking another sip of wine. Milo tried to look fearsome. An Ewok would have more success. But everyone had heard tales of the legendary cruelty and brutality of Mechanus’s Dark Jedi, and those tales did the trick where Milo’s ridiculous sneer did not.

Joni’s expression didn’t change, but her skin turned darker – a telltale sign of anger in a Zeltron – and she crossed her arms. “You may have the advantage here and now, but our troops are many and you are not. Threatening me will not gain you what you want.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Zack admitted. “While the _Society_ has nothing to gain, _you_ do. If your boss doesn’t accept our proposal, we can…arrange a change in leadership.”

Joni’s eyes lit up and Zack knew that he had her on the hook. It was frowned upon to openly slay one’s superiors in the Society of the Dragon…which is why promotions often came from mysterious accidents and attacks from “rival gangs.” Anyone in the second in command slot to a boyar wanted to become a boyar herself. It was just common sense.

“What’s in it for _you,_ Mr. Underwood?” Joni wondered. “Surely you cannot be acting out of the goodness of your own heart.”

“Let’s just say that we’re acting on behalf of certain very powerful interests on Coruscant and leave it at that,” Milo said. Zack was highly impressed. Milo had come up with a highly plausible sub-textual reason for their involvement – that they were working for one of Czerka’s megacorporation rivals who wanted to muscle in on the restoration project themselves – while not actually lying in the text. After all, they _were_ acting on behalf of the Galactic Republic and the chancellor, and what was more powerful than that?

Joni took another sip of wine, studying Milo carefully, and then nodded. “Very well. I shall arrange a… _meeting_ with the boyar. You’ll be contacted with the time and place. A pleasure doing business with you, Messrs. Murphy and Underwood.”

Zack waited until he was absolutely sure that not only Joni, but her cronies were gone before letting out a huge sigh of relief. “Wow. I can’t believe that worked. You were absolutely sensational, Milo.”

“So is it true?” Milo asked.

“What’s true?” Zack wondered. “Oh, you mean do I have the death sentence in five systems? Yeah, that’s true. They’re all ruled by the same guy, this king. He was forcing his daughter into an arranged marriage, and I was hired by one of his political rivals to sabotage it. Once I found out that her betrothed was over twice her age and she hated his guts, I helped her escape the planet. The king was so angry that he had me sentenced to death in absentia. Last I heard from her, she’s working as a waitress on a cantina on –”

“Not that!” Milo said. “The boyfriend part!”

Zack blinked. “It is…if you want it to be. I’m ready now, Milo. You’re the one who wanted to wait, remember?”

Milo closed his eyes and thought about it for a while. “No. Not yet. I’m sorry, Zack.”

“Only a jerk would want you to apologize for not being ready to rush into a relationship,” Zack assured him. “I’m a lot of things. A jerk isn’t one of them. Now let’s see if we can con another bottle of wine from the bartender, okay?”

Milo gave him a thumbs up, and Zack’s heart soared.

*****

“I want it stated for the record that this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Melissa announced as the three of them walked towards the offices of Havaselve Enterprises the next evening. “Why didn’t you consult me on this? I should have been in the bar with you!”

“You weren’t in the bar with me because I didn’t want you Force-lightninging people left, right, and center,” Zack retorted bluntly. “And Milo likes the idea, don’t you?”

Milo shrugged. Truth be told, he didn’t, but he didn’t have a better one. Zack was the strategist among them, not him. “Melissa, if you can come up with a better one, I’m all ears. But we have to do this.”

“I mean, we’re walking into a trap here, you know that, right?” Melissa pressed. “These people sent an assassin droid that killed _dozens_ of people to kidnap Milo. And we don’t even know why. I can’t believe you didn’t even _ask_ this Joni person. She probably would have lied, but, _come on,_ why not even try?”

That was actually a really good point. Milo should have asked, and it was probably a sign that he had been affected by Joni’s pheromones more than he thought he was that he didn’t. It had been a highly unsettling experience. Feeling such intense, powerful attraction for a woman, after never feeling any attraction for them all his life, felt _wrong_ in a way that he could barely describe. 

Melissa must have sensed his feelings, because she squeezed his upper arm and gave him a friendly smile. “All right, I’m sure you did the best you could. It was a tense situation, and we’re going to get our answers right here and now. Just relax and follow the plan, as poorly conceived as it may be.”

Zack didn’t bother responding to the taunt as he pressed the button that buzzed the secretary at the front desk, who unlocked the door and let them in. “I’m sure that everything’s going to be fine,” Milo assured him. “And for the record, Melissa, I think that it’s a great plan.” _Well, it will be if it works,_ he added mentally.

His friends beside him, Milo stepped into the rock-lion’s den.

And that wasn’t as much of an exaggeration as you might suspect. The Ithorians hadn’t been exaggerating about Dr. Not Sorry’s experiments. The lobby was filled with horrible, twisted abominations, splices of species that had absolutely no relation to one another, creatures out of the most depraved nightmares. Milo knew that he’d be seeing a lot of these creatures in his dreams that night…if he lived long enough to dream about them.

“Ah, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Underwood,” Dr. Not Sorry said gleefully, stepping out into the lobby. A spotlight followed him where he went. He was human, bald, and wore horned rimmed glasses and a red and white striped blazer over a bright blue shirt and matching slacks. “I welcome you to my little abode.” He looked over at Melissa. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance, pretty lady. Your name is…?”

Melissa waved a hand and reached out with the Force to implant a command in the mad doctor’s mind. “You don’t need to know my name.”

“But of course, I don’t need to know your name,” Dr. Not Sorry went on, as if the idea had been solely his own. “I do believe that you and my second-in-command had a…business arrangement. Why don’t you come with me and have a chat with her?”

He snapped his fingers and twelve hulking figures dropped from the ceiling and aimed blaster rifles at Milo and his friends. The blaster rifles were quite superfluous, though. By the looks of it, Dr. Not Sorry had spliced together a Wookiee and a zakkeg, a reptile found on Onderon’s only moon for his bodyguards, and they could probably tear apart someone with their bare hands with as much effort as it took Milo to open a box of crackers.

Milo had no choice but to follow Dr. Not Sorry through a maze of hallways into a large chamber containing a massive pool of water. Suspended over the water in a cage was Joni, who looked incredibly terrified. And she had good reason to be, given that the cage was, slowly but surely, being lowered into the pool which was filled with ice piranhas, a rare variant of piranha found on the ice planet of Hoth.

Milo had never had cause to regret that he was so knowledgeable about xenobiology…until now.

“I guess she’s a bit too busy to talk right now. In fact, you might say she’s… _all tied up at the moment!”_ Dr. Not Sorry said, laughing maniacally as if he had said something incredibly witty instead of one of one of the oldest clichés in the book.

Melissa sighed, looking incredibly disappointed. “You know, I expected a lot more from the great Ashton Whitfield. But you’re just a two-bit petty thug.”

Milo’s jaw dropped. Ashton Whitfield was the most wanted man in Republic space, a legendary torturer for the Sith Empire whose medical experimentation on helpless prisoners had become the stuff of nightmares for all even vaguely civilized individuals. It was rumored that he reserved his worst sadism for captured Jedi, to the point where some of them would commit suicide rather than risk falling into his hands.

Dr. Not Sorry didn’t look anything like Ashton Whitfield, but that wasn’t surprising. There were all sorts of techniques one could use to alter one’s appearance if you had enough credits, and even more if you had no ethics whatsoever.

“A thug?!” Whitfield said, his voice rising in incredulity. “I’ll have you know, young lady, that I am a criminal mastermind beyond compare! I am Ashton Whitfield, and I am the most brilliant criminal to have ever existed in the history of the universe!”

Milo laughed confidently, immediately seeing where Melissa was going. “Nah, I think Melissa’s on the right track. You’re just taking credit for unfortunate accidents, slacking off on the job to do these perverted experiments of yours.

“SLACK OFF?!” Whitefield shouted. “You insolent _fool!_ It is I who has been responsible for all these so-called accidents! They were acts of sabotage most elegant! You there!” he said, snapping his fingers at the nearest abomination. “Get the files on the Ithorian sabotage from my office! I will prove to this upstart my genius!”

When the abomination returned with the files, Milo flipped through them. They were indeed all the proof that he would need, recording thoroughly the exact nature of the so-called accidents and the soldiers responsible for each and every one of them. Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be anything that could directly incriminate Czerka.

“Well, I think we have everything that we need, don’t you?” Zack asked Melissa who nodded. He spoke into the microphone he was covertly wearing under his shirt. “Move in!”

The sound of blaster fire erupted from the lobby. Whitfield, sensing that the situation had turned against him, pulled out a blaster pistol and grabbed Melissa by the throat. He put her into a headlock. Melissa shrieked, her eyes wide with fear.

And then at least twenty heavily armed TSF officers, led by Officer Nicholson, charged into the room. “Ashton Whitfield, you are under arrest for war crimes, sabotage, and attempted murder.”

“FOOLS!” Whitfield screamed at the abominations. “Shoot them! SHOOT THEM ALL!”

Instead, the abominations dropped their blasters and raised what passed for their hands into the air. Whitfield snarled. “Never mind! You will all die at my hands, starting with her!”

The fear gone from Melissa’s face as if it was never there – because, of course, it never had been – Melissa knocked the blaster out of his hand with the Force and tossed him into the ice piranha pit, her face now filled with glee.

“Melissa,” Milo said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. The piranhas were circling the screaming and sobbing Whitfield, and were seconds away from devouring him. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Oh, I do,” Melissa said, and Milo very much hoped it was just a trick of the light that made her eyes look yellow very briefly. “But… I won’t.”

With another gesture of her hand, Whitfield was thrown out of the pool, landing directly in front of Officer Nicholson. “THIS ISN’T OVER!” Whitfield screamed. “I’ll get my revenge, you’ll see! You’ll all see!”

They never saw him again.

*****

“You tricked me,” Joni accused. After hours of debrief from the TSF, they had all finally been cleared to go, even Joni. “You said you were going to kill him for me. Then you let him know I was onto him. What the _kriff?”_

Zack leaned back in the comfy chair of the office that had once belonged to Whitfield, but now belonged to Joni, the new boyar. It really was a very comfy chair. He had sent Melissa and Milo to the Ithorian compound to settle accounts with them. This was a conversation that was best conducted one on one.

“I didn’t trick you. You tricked yourself. All I said was that we would arrange a change in leadership. You assumed that meant murder. But corpses create questions. My clients dislike questions.”

Joni’s skin darkened. “I could have been eaten by piranhas.”

“I don’t deal in what-ifs. I promised to benefit you, and I did. Now you’re the new boyar of the Society and you’re _also_ the respected businesswoman who bravely turned against her employer, at great risk to her life, when she discovered that he was a war criminal and a mobster. Telling Whitfield that you were onto him was a necessary part of selling that ruse.” In reality, they had done no such thing and Whitfield had found out on his own, but if Joni wanted to think that, who was he to say otherwise?

“The TSF owes you,” Zack went on, “the Republic owes you, the Society owes you, and my clients owe you. That’s quite a heady position for you to be in. And all you had to do was to serve the role of damsel in distress for a while… _duckling.”_

Joni’s skin returned to its normal color. “Remind me never to sit on the other side of a pazaak table from you, Mr. Underwood. In accordance with our agreement, I will immediately cease our association with Czerka and our harassment of the Ithorians.”

“There’s something else I need,” Zack added, and rolled his eyes when Joni started taking her shirt off. Really, she was overselling the femme fatale role. “Not that. I wouldn’t have said no under normal circumstances, but this isn’t one of them. I want to know why the Voivode has put a bounty on Milo Murphy.”

Joni blinked. “I have no clue. Honest! I don’t know why the Voivode does what he does. I’ve never even _met_ him. No one below a boyar does. But now that I’m a boyar, I can ask him when we meet, how about that? I’ll send you a comm when I do.”

Zack gave Joni his contact information. He knew that she would never actually end up contacting them, but it was probably best if she thought that she had been able to trick him, lest she try harder and _succeed_ at doing so. “It’s been nice doing business with you, Boyar Joni. I sincerely hope we don’t meet again.”

“Likewise,” Joni said, bowing her head politely. Zack could not get out of the room fast enough.

As soon as he had seen a holoimage of Dr. Not Sorry, he had recognized him immediately. True, the face had changed, but the sadistic look on his face had not, and there were only so many individuals in the galaxy who specialized in genetic splicing.

Getting the TSF to participate in their little sting operation had been difficult, but after Melissa had threatened to sue them into oblivion (“This space station will belong to _me_ when I’m done with you! It’ll be called _Melissa_ Station!") _and_ publish accounts of their incompetence in every outlet from there to Coruscant, they had finally been able to persuade them.

Whitfield’s arrest meant an end to the sabotage, and the fulfillment of their agreement. Even if Joni had wanted to continue the sabotage, the newfound attention focused on her meant that she wouldn’t. She now had an aura of respectability to her, and that was not something you gave up when you had it.

As Zack walked to the Ithorian compound, his thoughts were wandering to what he would do that evening, since they would wait until the morning to depart for the planet’s surface. While of course he respected Milo’s decision to not date until the Sara situation had been resolved, surely there was no harm in asking him out to a fancy restaurant as a friend, especially if Melissa was there to chaperone.

He was looking forward to seeing the expression on Milo’s face when he came out of the compound. He was expecting happiness.

He was not expecting sheer, unrelenting horror. “Zack…” Milo said, and then he burst into tears.

“What happened?” Zack asked Melissa.

“They’re dead, Zack,” she responded. “The Ithorians. Every last one of them.” 


	7. They Provide Advantage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, bad guys make the best good guys.

Melissa had been exaggerating about all the Ithorians being dead – but not by much. By Milo’s count, there had been over two hundred Ithorians present in the compound, and perhaps a tenth of that number was still alive when Milo and Melissa had entered the compound and found armored troops gunning down Ithorians left, right, and center.

The troops had fought valiantly, but they hadn’t stood a chance against the two former Jedi. Milo’s usage of Murphy’s Law to destroy or otherwise sabotage the blasters that the troops had been wielding and Melissa’s incredibly swift mastery of the vibrosword that she had bought while planning to take down Dr. Not Sorry brought them down one by one. Finally, no one was left but their leader, who raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Don’t kill me!” he shouted, and took off his helmet to reveal a perfectly ordinary looking middle aged human male. he had passed him in the street, he wouldn’t have given him a second glance. He looked vaguely familiar, actually. Had Milo served with him during the Mandalorian Wars?

“I’ll be the one who decides who gets killed around here,” Melissa snarled at him, waving the vibrosword around so haphazardly that Milo was worried that she’d bisect the commander by mistake. Her eyes were not yellow, thank the Force, but still, it was quite an alarming sight to see. “Now start talking! What’s your name? Who put you up to this?”

“I can’t! They’ll kill me!” he said, and started crying. “Milo, please don’t let them kill me.” That settled it, then. They must have known each other during the war.

Milo sighed. “Melissa, can’t we just turn him in? He doesn’t have to die.”

Melissa pressed the vibrosword against the commander’s throat. “You’re right, Milo. He doesn’t _have_ to die… _if_ he can give us some useful information.”

The commander laughed. “You idiots. You think that turning me in and killing me _isn’t the same thing?_ Lieutenant Block is _in on it._ Why do you think he’s not here? Why do you think he left that lackwit Nicholson in charge?” He took a deep breath. “Look, I’ll tell you everything, if you promise to let me go.”

Milo looked over at Melissa, who nodded. “Okay. We’ll let you go. I promise. Start with your name and work your way out from there.”

The commander took a deep breath. “I am Captain Laden Menke, of the Ryyk Company. We are mercenaries and our client is the Czerka Corporation. We received orders to kill everyone in the compound and frame the Society of the Dragon. Czerka intends to seize control of Citadel Station by force, ostensibly to protect the project from Society interference. They will strike in less than twenty-four hours.”

“You said you infiltrated the TSF,” Milo said. “Is Lopez one of your people? Did you kidnap Baljeet?”

Menke shook his head. “We established a false identity for Lopez, but only because she had paid us. We don’t know who she is, where she went, or kidnapped your friend. That’s all I know, I swear.”

Milo nodded at Melissa, who reluctantly sheathed her blade. Menke ran towards the exit as quick as possible. It turned out to not be quick enough. Just before he reached it, a blaster bolt speared Menke through the neck. He sank to his knees, coughed up blood, and dropped dead.

Milo turned to face Scott, who, despite bleeding profusely from a hole in his stomach, had been well enough to pick up a blaster rifle from a dead mercenary and shoot Menke dead. Milo wished that he felt _bad_ about Menke’s death. After all, the two of them had once fought side by side, even if Milo still couldn’t remember him very clearly. But then again, a lot of his memory of that time was fuzzy.

But Menke had chosen to massacre dozens of unarmed, defenseless sentient beings. Was it really the most unjust thing in the universe that one of their compatriots had killed him in turn?

“May his soul forever wander Trinta, being eaten by maggots and afire simultaneously,” Scott said, spitting on the corpse for good measure. “I knew you would come to save us, Milo Murphy. And whoever you are.” Melissa rolled her eyes.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Milo said. The words seemed rote, completely meaningless in the face of the carnage that was around him, but Scott seemed to appreciate them.

“Well, if you’d just care to give us that shuttle you promised us, we’ll be on our way,” Melissa said. Milo stared at her in shock. Melissa had seemed a bit callous at times, but was she really going to shrug off all this death and just move forward?

Melissa seemed to sense what he was feeling, because she gave him a reassuring smile. “Look, Milo, we’re not an army. We don’t have what it takes to win against these mercenaries, especially if they’ve infiltrated the TSF. Once we get to Coruscant, we can notify Chancellor Fletcher and let him handle the situation. He _has_ an army, after all.”

The logic was convincing enough, but Milo knew that the universe ran on far more than logic. It would have been wrong to abandon the Ithorians in their hour of need. It was as simple as that. And on top of that, if Czerka took over the station, all the Ithorians and their employees, including Sara, would be in danger. That would have been more than reason enough to interfere even without there being moral considerations as well.

Melissa groaned. “You’ve got that look on your face again. The one that says ‘I’ve got some really bad ideas that will only succeed due to dumb luck and there’s no way you can talk me out of them.’”

“You know me so well!” Milo gushed. “But they’re good ideas, I promise!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Melissa said, sounding totally unconvinced. “Scott, you and your people can find a safe place to hide? We don’t want you getting caught in the crossfire.”

“We have a secret bunker for emergencies like this one, with top of the line medical equipment,” Scott assured her. “My people will be safe there. Thank you so much, Milo. And…whatever your name is.”

Melissa did a facepalm as Scott scurried away.

*****

Zack listened to this whole story without any comment, and then, only at the end, did he ask the question that he thought, quite erroneously, was the most pertinent one: “So, wait, does he just not _remember_ your name, or did you never tell it to him?”

“Maybe the second one,” Melissa admitted in a tone of voice that almost sounded sheepish, although since it was coming out of _Melissa,_ it only descended as far as slight embarrassment.

Zack considered the situation carefully. It was typical of Milo to promise to come riding to the rescue and stop Czerka. It was a very foolish move, but it was likely a necessary one as well. They wanted to have credibility when they briefed the chancellor on the Pistachion threat. But credibility was the last thing they had right now. They had gotten the chancellor’s friend kidnapped under their nose, a mining facility exceptionally critical to the Republic’s infrastructure had been destroyed, and they had avoided rendezvousing with the chancellor in favor of conducting a personal rescue mission that was looking increasingly like a wild goose chase.

In other words, they needed a victory under their belt if Fletcher was going to take them seriously. And what better victory would there be than stopping the illegal power grab of a megacorporation that was known to have favored Fletcher’s opponent in the last chancellery election? 

Still, _achieving_ such a victory was easier said than done. Czerka was now committing massacres with impunity, they had infiltrated deeply into the TSF, and they had more credits than any of them could _ever_ hope to earn in a million lifetimes. Zack crunched the variables in his head for quite some time, but eventually he came to a conclusion that he always, _always_ despised.

He had no idea what to do next. Fortunately, he knew who would.

“We have to talk to Joni,” Zack said, and then he put his hands up before either Milo and Melissa could object. “I know, she’s scum, but if Czerka are playing dirty, then we have to as well, and who plays dirtier than the Society of the Dragon?”

“Actually, I think that’s a pretty good idea,” Milo said and Zack just _stared_ at him. Had Milo been replaced by a clone when he wasn’t looking? Or maybe he was under mind control or something! Oh, Force, had Melissa somehow _brainwashed_ him?!

Milo must have noticed Zack’s frantic expression because he laughed. “Zack, that look on your face is so adorable. Just because it’s a good idea doesn’t mean that I _like_ it. But it’s the only one we have.” Zack breathed a sigh of relief. “Unless you’ve got a better one?”

Melissa shook her head, looking angry at herself for not having a better idea. “If this gets us killed, I reserve the right to haunt this station forever. We can do that, you know.” Zack had no idea if she was joking or not. He looked at Milo, who shrugged.

When they had brought the news of the impending Czerka takeover to Joni, she had groaned, but not looked particularly surprised. “Yeah, I figured something like this was coming. But Dr. Not Sorry refused to even _consider_ the idea that his allies could turn against him. In fact, I think the moron was planning on sticking the knife in _first._ Can you believe that?”

Zack could definitely believe that. While the monster had been, technically speaking, a very intelligent man, tactical planning had decidedly not been his forte. “So what are we going to do here? We want to stop this takeover, and so do you, am I right?”

Joni sighed. “Do I _want_ to stop it? No. There’s a lot of profit to be made from a Czerka controlled Citadel Station. Do I _need_ to stop it? Yes. Like it or not, I stand with the Ithorians now, and a slight against them is a slight against the Society, and its boyar. Let me think about this for a while.”

They waited patiently as Joni wrote on a datapad feverishly, muttering to herself under her breath quite a bit. She almost looked frightened, and definitely looked frantic. Finally, after three quarters of an hour, she set the datapad down. “I have a plan. You may not like it.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” Melissa muttered. “Tell us what it is, and we’ll make that determination.”

Joni told them the plan, and she was wrong. Zack liked the plan quite a bit. In fact, it would actually be a very fun plan to execute. Assuming, of course, that it worked and didn’t end with them being viciously killed. But Zack couldn’t see any major holes in the plan, and he was _good_ at finding them.

In the end, owing to a lack of _any_ other options, short of the ridiculously stupid one of going to Nicholson and hoping he would demonstrate even a shred of competence, they decided to go with Joni’s plan, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t kill them.

*****

Above all else, Baljeet valued knowledge. The world of interstellar diplomacy was a cutthroat one, and one that was far more complex than most people assumed. The slightest mistake in the declension of a noun, to use just one of many examples, could make the difference between diffident flattery and a vicious insult and that, in turn, could make the difference between a peace treaty and a devastating war. Knowledge was power, and a chancellor’s use of power could save trillions of lives. Or end them.

And Baljeet had much more knowledge than the average sentient. He had an unfair advantage. As an android, he could interface directly with the HoloNet. He put information straight into his memory banks. Unless he altered the contents of those banks directly, he was completely incapable of forgetting any fact, figure, or statistic.

That was not to say that he was omniscient, or anything close to it. Such an idea would be laughable. He was, however, far closer to it than the vast, _vast_ majority of sentients in the galaxy. He _knew_ things. It was his _shtick._ But he could not know if the information that had was _accurate._ The HoloNet said, for example, that the average height of the krykna, a predatory arachnid species found on Atollon was two meters. Baljeet had to take its word for that, as he had never been on Atollon and, thankfully, had never had the opportunity to see a krykna for himself.

The HoloNet also said that the hub of the Telos Polar Irrigation System had been abandoned since it was bombed by Admiral Denise Fletcher, Ferb’s treasonous mother, during the Jedi Civil War.

It would appear that there was definitely some teeth in the expression that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.

Baljeet was capable of emulating a variety of human emotions, and it seemed that his capacity for emotional resonance was just growing as time went on. He now knew what it was like to experience embarrassment, and he very much hoped that it would not be an experience that he would have again. Contrary to Melissa’s expectations, it was not a romantic assignation, or any hint of one, that the ersatz Officer Lopez had used to lure him to his suite, but rather simply a promise to provide information regarding the assassin who had attacked his associates.

The end result had been the same, though. Lopez had attacked him from behind. One moment, he was in a hotel room, the next, he woke up in what looked like a prison cell. For what felt like months, he was asked questions about his compatriots by Lopez and another woman wearing white robes. He suspected that his internal chronometer had been sabotaged, but he couldn’t _know_ that for sure.

Amanda, as she insisted that Baljeet call her, had seemed pleasant, kind, and sympathetic. By contrast, her compatriot, who she referred to as Sister Fovea, seemed to enjoy shouting a lot. But, to be fair, that was pretty much all she could do. Baljeet was incapable of feeling pain, so torture was useless, and they didn’t have any other leverage to use against him. What else could they do, threaten to smash Norm? He would wield the sledgehammer against the assassin droid himself if need be.

Baljeet could resist their interrogation indefinitely if need be, but the Republic didn’t _have_ indefinitely. So eventually he started talking, though he hadn’t just given information away for free. For starters, he insisted that he would only talk to Amanda in the hopes that he could strengthen the rapport that they appeared to share. He had also asked for information in return. It took a very long while, but a picture started to form.

He was in a Jedi academy of sorts, although there were no students yet, and got given its rough location. Amanda belonged to a newly formed group called the Order of the Watchful Eye, whose objective was to monitor recruits for signs of dark side corruption and, if necessary, execute them.

Baljeet had a feeling that they would probably do that even if it was unnecessary.

The Watchful were all Force blind, which seemed counterintuitive to Baljeet, but he had long ago ceased trying to figure out the various contradictions that seemed to commonplace to the organic. They were all women, and most of them had fought for the Republic during the Jedi Civil War. All of them had, at the very least, military and/or law enforcement experience. Amanda had been a police officer on Eriadu before joining the Watchful.

Baljeet was just starting to think that his repeated begging to release him, combined with assertions of his devotion towards the cause of the Galactic Republic, was beginning to get Amanda to reconsider her actions when he was dragged roughly out of his cell in the middle of the night and hauled into a chamber that looked suspiciously like the Jedi Council chamber.

Three Watchful members, none of whom was Amanda, aimed blaster rifles at him. He was handcuffed and placed in the center of the circle. Or, rather, what _had_ been a circle in the chambers on Coruscant and Dantooine. Here, it was a semicircle. While, as an expert on the occult had once pointed out, a circle could be measured beginning anywhere, there was one focal point of the semicircle and, to emphasize this point, an elaborate chair had been placed.

But how’s about we call it what it really was? It was a throne. Whoever led the Watchful had enthroned themselves, and that, in Baljeet’s opinion, was a very bad sign.

A door opened in the wall behind the semicircle of seats, previously appearing to have been a part of the wall, and a woman stepped into the room. She was a severe looking, tall and thin woman in her early fifties, with long brown hair going grey, brown eyes, and an angular face, wearing robes of the purest white.

Baljeet recognized her instantaneously, much to his surprise. Her name was Elizabeth Milder. She was a Jedi Master, and she was supposed to have died on Katarr during the most recent Jedi conclave there. It could only have been a bizarre quirk of fate that caused her to survive when hardly anyone else did…

…or she had never been there at all.

Before Baljeet could compute the full ramifications of that theory, Milder stepped forward and ignited a lightsaber, its blade yellow. And that was even more surprising. Though the Jedi was not formally required to hand over all information regarding its lightsabers to the Republic, they had done so for many generations as a courtesy. They knew a lot about Elizabeth Milder’s lightsaber. It was so plain that it almost cycled back to ostentatious again, especially given the electrum finish it had, and its blade was pure silver. This yellow lightsaber wasn’t hers at all.

It was Milo Murphy’s.

“You stand before the last Jedi in existence,” Milder said. “You were tasked with contacting the Jedi and bringing them back to their former glory, and yet you did not reach out to me. Why?”

“We thought you were dead,” Baljeet explained. “Reports had indicated that you had died on Katarr. I am gratified by your survival, Master Jedi, and I would be exponentially more grateful if you would release me. I am sure that Chancellor Fletcher will be more than willing to overlook this…misunderstanding should you do so.”

Something very dangerous flashed in Milder’s eyes and she inched her way forward towards him, which would have been alarming even if she hadn’t held a lit lightsaber in her hand. “I see. You are indeed a beneficent and forgiving droid, Baljeet Tjinder. You even forgave the sins of your traveling companions: a wanted criminal and a monster.”

Baljeet was offended. He couldn’t stand Norm any more than anyone else, but that was because of months and months of experience having to prevent that homicidal maniac from snapping and slaughtering everyone in sight. Milder didn’t even _know_ him, and she was making judgments. “Norm is a droid, and he is only following his programming.”

Milder blinked. He seemed to have thrown her for a loop. “Stop trying to confuse me. I am speaking, of course, of Milo Murphy. He is pure evil, and you wish _him_ to rebuild the Jedi Order?! Even _Exar Kun_ is worthier to run the Order than he.”

Now she wasn’t even making sense. Milo had been annoying at times, and he had this _astoundingly irritating_ habit of whistling under his breath, and he wasn’t even _aware_ of that, and, really, if Baljeet hadn’t been able to disable his auditory processors temporarily, he probably would have strangled him out of pure frustration. But pure evil? The idea was laughable. The only logical solution was that they were thinking of two different people. That wasn’t too implausible, now that Baljeet thought of it. The Jedi Order had been thousands strong, after all.

“You’re probably a bit confused, Master Milder,” Baljeet said soothingly. “Perhaps there’s been a case of mistaken identity here.”

“If anyone is confused here, it is you, droid,” Milder said, her voice colder than the weather outside the facility. “Murphy is a liar, a villain, and a mass murderer. He is responsible for the death of scores of Jedi through his base cunning and odious decision to activate the Mass Shadow Generator. And if you stand with him…then you will die.”

Baljeet barely even managed to open his mouth to plead his case before Milder cut his head off. Thankfully, while Phineas had given him many, _many_ human qualities, an inability to survive decapitation had not been one of them. He was definitely not in a good position, true, but he could weather just about anything that these maniacs would throw at him.

“Dismantle him,” Milder ordered. “And have Sister Retina incinerate all the pieces, one by one.”

Except that.

******

Esmeralda Poofenplotz, director of the Czerka Corporation’s Citadel Station branch, smelled fear, and it smelled _so good._

The takeover of Citadel Station had gone far smoother than Poofenplotz had envisioned even in her wildest dreams. Her mercenaries, disguised as members of the TSF, along with actual members of the TSF, had struck at the crack of dawn. They had assembled the members of the TSF who had refused to join her glorious new order, and locked them up in prison cells. Eventually, they would be killed, but not yet. Not while they still had use.

With the Ithorians, those disgusting smelly tree-huggers, all dead, it had been child’s play to assume the title of coordinator of Citadel Station. She had not yet officially declared herself queen of Telos, but everyone knew that she was the queen anyway. Crowns, thrones, and other finery were a universal language.

Ostensibly, Czerka had assumed control in order to defend the station against the threat of the Society. But the fact that many of the new TSF officers had tattoos all over their bodies was enough to tell even the dumbest peasant who was truly pulling the Society’s strings.

True, there were still a few unknown variables. Joni, the new leader of the Society, had disappeared from sight, and no one had positively identified that freak Scott’s body. But these were only minor obstacles compared to the will of Esmeralda Poofenplotz.

They had called her mad. Who is this they I speak of? It’s somewhat immaterial. Practically _anyone_ who spent more than thirty seconds in Poofenplotz’s company could _smell_ the madness coming off of her. She didn’t care. She had never cared. Other beings didn’t matter. Only Esmeralda Poofenplotz mattered. She was the focal point around which all the planets rotated, around which the galaxy spun. Life had been made for one and only one purpose: To eventually create her. She was perfection. She was infinite. She was herself, and that was all she needed to be.

No one looked her in the eye as she passed through the halls of Citadel Station. They were all afraid of her. As it should be.

And then she saw the unthinkable: Someone who _wasn’t_ afraid of her. Some sort of midget. No wait, it was…what was the name for them again? Oh, yes, a child.

“You will kneel, child, before the infinite majesty of Esmeralda Poofenplotz,” Poofenplotz commanded.

The child _laughed_ at her. He actually laughed! Oh, that could not stand. Not at all.

“Please, ma’am, have mercy on little Samuel,” the child’s mother said, and at a nod from Poofenplotz, her lead bodyguard shot her in the heart. The child’s father ran for Poofenplotz, only to receive a trio of blaster bolts to the back.

Poofenplotz laughed maniacally and then turned to her new secretary. “Put the child in a cell and starve her to death.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” her secretary said with a crisp salute using the only arm she had. At least _some_ people knew how to show proper respect, unlike the wastrels that surrounded her.

As Poofenplotz walked away, she decided she would visit the cell from time to time and offer the child food, only to take it away. That sounded fun!

Yes, things were looking up.

*****

Milo winced in pain as he stood up. Even though Melissa had made sure that the bodyguard’s blasters would be set to the lowest level possible, it still hurt like heck to have a bolt of energy hit you in the _heart_ at a tremendously fast speed. Thank goodness for Jedi healing techniques. He tossed the wig that he had been wearing while masquerading as the child’s mother to the ground.

Zack let out a string of Huttese curses that made Milo’s ears turn as red as a Sith’s lightsaber to even hear. “This is the worst thought-out plan we’ve ever had.”

“I refuse to believe,” Bradley said, “that you have _ever_ thought out a plan before in your lives.” He removed the school uniform that he had been wearing. He was wearing his normal TSF uniform underneath. Milo had been worried that Poofenplotz would realize that Bradley was very much _not_ a child, but apparently, he had been worried for nothing.

Even though he’d taken a blaster bolt to the heart, Milo was still enjoying himself greatly. He had long daydreamed about starring on _Advantage,_ and now he was running a con alongside Zack against an evil tyrant. He got to wear a _disguise!_ It was so cool.

“You sell the role of an evil minion surprisingly well,” Zack said to Melissa, who shrugged modestly.

“You didn’t do so badly yourself in the role of horrified father,” she complimented, and for some reason, Zack’s eyes narrowed in…suspicion? Oh, come _on,_ was Zack seriously still suspicious of Melissa? Well, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the mission, Milo supposed that they could work out their issues later.

“We _all_ did amazingly,” Milo assured them. “This is so much fun! Except for the part where I got shot, and even _that_ was fun!” Zack just stared at him. Milo looked back, confused.

Then he clapped his hands. “Okay! No time to stand here talking. We have to have everything into position for phase two. Bradley, do you have everything in readiness?”

Bradley nodded, but he looked troubled. “The uniforms are a bit old, though. Like, Great Sith War old. I hope that’s not going to be a problem?”

“Are you kidding me?!” Milo said excitedly. “Great Sith War uniforms are so rare these days! I absolutely must see them before showtime! Wow! I get to wear a _Great Sith War_ uniform! This day keeps on getting better and better!”

Zack sighed. “Milo, aren’t you laying it on a little thick there? You’re starting to sound like Norman, you’re so cheery.”

“What can I say? I love history.”

Melissa clapped her hands, looking somewhat irritated. “All right, let’s keep this conversation moving. The uniforms being old makes them even _easier_ for our purposes. We’ll need all the help we can get with leading Poofenplotz to the path we want her to take. This is a brilliant plan, and I will only say that _once,_ but only if it _succeeds._ So let’s make sure it does, okay?”

Milo couldn’t argue with that logic.

*****

It was a burden being as beautiful as Esmeralda Poofenplotz. For some reason, the universe that made her perfect in all other ways was cruel and capricious enough to require a strenuous beauty regimen to have her outer self reflect the magnificence that was her inner self. Perhaps it was the dark side that the Jedi were always whining about that made it so.

“Ma’am, we have a situation down in the hangars,” her secretary said. She didn’t know her secretary’s name, but that was okay. Her secretary had told her that her name was not important, and she had just sounded so _confident_ in that moment, especially when she added that chic hand gesture to the mix, that Poofenplotz had let it slide. “A Republic shuttle has arrived! They’re here to inspect the station.”

One did not become the most brilliant being in all the universe by panicking, and Poofenplotz was an ocean of pure tranquility in all moments. With the calm and evenhandedness that characterized all her actions, she shrieked, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THE REPUBLIC IS HERE TO INSPECT THE STATION?! THEY WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO ARRIVE FOR ANOTHER WEEK!”

“We can have them all killed,” her secretary suggested.

“Are you mad?!” Poofenplotz screamed. “That’d just raise further questions! We have to deal with this here and now. Report to the executioner for evisceration, dear. You’ve failed me for the last time.”

She didn’t bother to watch her secretary salute as she stormed out of the office and towards the hangars, accompanied by her most loyal guards. She would deal with the situation herself, as there was clearly no one else competent enough in the station to handle it.

She was disappointed by what waited for her in the hangar. She expected a top of the line military shuttle, with a cadre of troops hundreds strong, led by some strapping admiral. Instead, what she got was some piece of junk with barely more than a dozen soldiers wearing uniforms that looked old and worn.

“Captain Gordon Webster,” the dark-skinned man who appeared to be their leader said. “You are Esmeralda Poofenplotz, leader of this branch of Czerka? We’ve received reports on a host of irregularities here, and we’ve been sent to investigate. Under what authority have you seized control of this station?”

“ _I_ AM ALL THE AUTHORITY NEEDED!” Poofenplotz screamed, throwing back her head and laughing. One of her guards whispered in her ear that, perhaps, she should try to be a little bit more composed.

Poofenplotz, making a mental note to shove a red hot poker through the guard’s throat as soon as their guests had left, coughed and said, “That is to say, I have assumed _temporarily_ executive control, for the greater good, in order to secure the station’s security. Okay, I’ve gotten bored of this.” She pointed at the guard destined to get a poker through the neck. “Remove the oxygen from this chamber and then eject the shuttle into space. You never saw them, we were never here.”

She didn’t bother waiting for an answer, or for the guard to activate the control console to remove the oxygen from the chamber. She just strode out of the chamber.

Honestly, these people must have thought that she was a _moron._ It was _insulting_ how they thought that she was some _greenhorn,_ able to be fooled by a couple of fake uniforms. As if she couldn’t see through that act in a second. Those people were no more Republic officers than she was. She didn’t know what trick they were planning on playing, but she knew that this had Joni’s fingerprints written all over it.

It didn’t matter anyway. Dead men told no tales.

A lesser person would have immediately taken revenge on Joni, but that would have been their mistake. It was a much sweeter revenge, Poofenplotz reflected as her beauty treatments continued, to have her be on her toes for days, or even weeks, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Poofenplotz would wait until Joni thought she was safe once more to strike.

There was no one who had better shoes to drop than Esmeralda Poofenplotz, and by shoe, she meant a tide of blood that would sweep, perhaps literally, through the offices of Havaselve Enterprises and engulf Joni in a maelstrom of pain and fury.

And then she’d make Joni beg for mercy, and she’d give it to her. All the mercy of the grave.

Then, perhaps, she have Joni cloned, and have her raised as Poofenplotz’s daughter, and on the day of her sixteenth birthday, she’d ram a knife through the clone’s heart. Yes, that’d –

“Your Majesty, we have a situation down in the hangars,” her new secretary said. How _dare_ he interrupt her?! He would have him flayed alive. “A Republic ship has arrived and –”

Poofenplotz drew a knife and threw it into the secretary’s heart. These morons were seriously trying the same tactic _again?_ She would teach them a lesson. A lesson taught, as all lessons should be, in blood. Also other people’s entrails. But mostly blood. She stormed over to her desk and pressed a button on the intercom. “Kill everyone in hangar 12, as messily as possible. Make them suffer excruciating, terrifying deaths. Use fire!”

And thus she settled back in her chair to relax, finally. It was tough work being a genius, after all. She had earned a break.

*****

If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself. Ferb Fletcher, Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, had never lived his life by this adage. If you only relied on yourself, you’d be constantly saddled with your own weaknesses forever. But if you worked with _other_ people, your respective flaws would cancel each other out.

Growing up as a child under the tutelage of Denise Fletcher had been an experience that Ferb would never wish on anyone. Denise had been all about self-reliance and standing on your own two feet and snuffing out any trace of weakness in one’s self and others. In retrospect, it had not been a stunning turn of events when she had joined the Sith.

But _how_ she had joined them was stunning indeed. She had turned against not only her government, but her own homeworld, and bombed Telos to smithereens, leaving practically nothing alive on the planet’s surface. Ferb, a loyal soldier of the Republic, had tried to stop her.

He had failed. It was the biggest regret of his life. 

When Ferb had realized that Denise was about to turn the _Leviathan’s_ terrible power against everyone he had ever known, she had tried to persuade him of the necessity of her actions. It had all fallen on deaf ears and when she realized she had failed, she had _shot_ him. Her own son. True, the blaster had been set to stun, but she had still attacked him in cold blood, and then dumped him in an escape pod. He could have suffocated in there if he hadn’t been lucky enough to be rescued by another warship still loyal to the Republic, which barely managed to escape into hyperspace.

From then on, Ferb vowed revenge on the Sith. He never thought he’d be instrumental in gaining it, least of all working alongside the legendary inventor Phineas Flynn, who turned out to be, technically, his stepbrother, to defeat Darth Mechanus’s “apprentice” (really, secretly Mechanus having taken over his apprentice’s body) in an epic battle that would be remembered for eons to come. Yet that was precisely what happened.

After that, he had renounced war and gone into politics, which turned out to be, in certain ways, even more _vicious_ than war. And somehow he had wound up ruler of the galaxy. Denise had taught him to be as ambitious as possible, he had rejected her teachings, and he had still achieved everything she had wanted from him. There was irony there somehow.

Of course, being Supreme Chancellor wasn’t a panacea. Though he had more power than anyone else in the galaxy, the sheer amount of laws, regulations, and traditions that he had to wade through meant that, paradoxically, it felt like sometimes he had _less_ power than anyone else. Getting _anything_ done was like swimming through molasses. He would gladly have handed the job to someone else if anyone had been worthy enough to take it.

Sadly, everyone who wanted the job didn’t deserve it and everyone who deserved it didn’t want it. Ah, politics. It was enough to drive a man mad.

He was just ruminating on the need for a vacation and possible excuses for it when he got a message from Baljeet. Except that while it was on his datapad, it wasn’t actually Baljeet on the other end of the line, but a man who looked far too young to be the commander of TSF troops that he claimed to be. He had spun a rather silly yarn about Czerka taking over the station and going mad with power. It was ludicrously implausible.

But, and this was the important part, it needed to be investigated anyway in accordance with protocol. It certainly _sounded_ serious enough at first glance to warrant the highest of authority present at the investigation. And Ferb had been longing to see his homeworld again, if only from the window of the space station.

So he had played along with what was doubtlessly just a prank and had his personal guard ready his ship to take him to Telos. If this Officer Nicholson fellow wanted to play games, Ferb could play games right back.

It wasn’t until his ship landed that he realized that he had _seriously_ misjudged the situation to an almost preposterous level. The Senate Guards aboard had gone ahead to scout, and several of them hadn’t returned. Rogue TSF soldiers were attacking them with _flamethrowers,_ of all things. Ferb yearned to go out there and teach them a lesson, but stray blaster bolts didn’t care that the entire civilized galaxy was riding on one’s survival.

Still, the view from the ship’s windows was satisfying enough. Maybe these hooligans could have handled themselves against amateurs, or even regular soldiers, but not the Senate Guard. They were the best of the best, trained to protect senators and the chancellor from all manner of threats. It was even said that the most exceptional of them could go toe to toe with Jedi or even Sith.

A couple of flamethrower wielding psychopaths? They stood no chance whatsoever.

It had taken mere hours to secure Citadel Station, and a picture gradually started to emerge. Esmeralda Poofenplotz, the leader of Czerka on the station, had murdered almost everyone in the Ithorian compound and then seized control of the place by force, installing a brutal campaign of terror that had already claimed 100 lives.

Ferb joined the Senate Guards and the remaining TSF loyalists as they stormed their way through the Czerka offices to Poofenplotz’s office, where they encountered pretty much the last thing that they suspected they would fine.

Poofenplotz was kneeling on the ground with a knife at her throat. This was not quite as surprising as the identity of the person who was holding the knife to her throat. Or, rather, not a person, but a droid.

“My protocol droid went berserk!” Poofenplotz screamed. “It has been impersonating me, using my name to commit all sorts of atrocities! I am merely a peaceful, gentle, kind businesswoman. Save me!”

Ferb was silent for a long while. This was not uncommon for him. He believed that in many cases, silence was more conducive than any words could be. Silence was his ally, and it was an ally whose help he gratefully embraced. Silence could serve many functions. In this case, it let Esmeralda Poofenplotz realize just how kriffed she was.

“Kill her,” he said finally to the protocol droid.

Poofenplotz blinked. “You…you can’t be serious. You wouldn’t let it kill me!”

“Perhaps I would, perhaps I would not. But that is a moot point, for I do not believe your life is in danger at all. Go ahead, droid. Slit her throat.” The droid did absolutely nothing. “As I thought. This is merely a sham.”

“You can’t prove that I gave any orders to commit illegal acts,” Poofenplotz shrieked. “There’s no proof whatsoever!”

And then, as if on cue, a holoprojector started playing quite damning footage indeed. It showed Poofenplotz giving the orders to have an innocent family shot and a child starved to death. Yes, the child was manifestly Officer Nicholson in disguise, but Poofenplotz hadn’t _known_ that when she had given the order.

“Esmeralda Poofenplotz,” Ferb said, barely hiding the undercurrent of glee in his voice, “you are under arrest for…well, perhaps it might be easier to list the offenses that you _aren’t_ under arrest for. Take her away!”

Poofenplotz grabbed the knife out of the droid’s hands and charged at Ferb, screaming. He didn’t even flinch, not when she started running and not when the Senate Guard shot her full of holes.

He looked at the corpse with satisfaction. Esmeralda Poofenplotz had been pure evil, and the galaxy was better off with her dead. Certainly Telos was.

As brilliant as Ferb Fletcher was, he was not perfect. He was not noted, for example, for his ability to direct his attention in several places at once. If he had, he assuredly would have noticed one of his seemingly ordinary soldiers slipping away. If he had, perhaps the shape of the galaxy’s history would have been different. But he did not, and so it wasn’t.

*****

Milo had been feeling guilty ever since he had left Telos, but Zack didn’t have time for guilt. For starters, he didn’t feel any. He was sure that the people of Citadel Station could take care of themselves. When they had gotten locked in a room with a shuttle and no one watching them slip away, they had taken the chance to flee with both hands. Besides, they weren’t needed for the next steps of the plan anyway, at least not in person. The droid could be sliced into remotely.

And for another thing, he’d been far too busy to have felt guilt even if he felt that he needed to. Slicing into the droid and letting Melissa temporarily take the controls was easy, but the closer they got to the planet’s surface, the more systems stopped working.

“Do you think they sabotaged the shuttle somehow?” Zack wondered.

Milo shook his head. “This is just regular old Murphy’s Law. It’ll be fine! You’ll get us to where we need to go, Zack!” Zack had absolutely no doubt that they would end up where they needed to go. It was whether they would end up in one piece once they had gotten there that was the issue at hand. “Melissa, what do you think?”

A loud snore reverberated through the shuttle in response. It must have been some Force ability that allowed Melissa to _nap_ when every alarm in the ship was blaring like it was trying to crush the universe with sound. Zack was envious.

In a bizarre way, there was something reassuring about all the mechanical problems they were having. The plan to liberate Telos from Czerka’s reign of terror had gone down without a hitch so far. They were able to get Melissa to infiltrate Czerka headquarters, stage the incident that made Poofenplotz look like the monster she was, and use reverse psychology to make Poofenplotz strike against the _real_ Republic inspectors when they arrived. They had even gotten Sara’s location from the Ithorians _and_ the _Ebon Hawk’s_ location from Joni, who had placed a tracking device on it the moment they arrived, just in case she needed it for leverage later.

But when you have a run of good luck, you’re always wary of bad luck impending, and that went exponentially more when Milo was around. Having something as normal as engine troubles was a relief. They could have all been a lot of trouble if, for example, the red light on the console started flashing.

“Hey, Zack, what’s that flashing red light on the console mean?” Milo asked.

“It means we’re probably all going to die,” Zack said bluntly. “Strap yourselves in for a landing!”

And with those words, he started steering the ship in the direction of what looked like the softest part of the rapidly approaching ground, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be the last thing he did.

*****

Bradley would have jumped up and down with excitement if it hadn’t been grossly unprofessional. Not only had Republic forces arrived to rescue them, but they had been led by none other than _Ferb Fletcher,_ Phineas’ stepbrother! Bradley had idolized Fletcher for years, even back when they had served on the same warship together, and now he was meeting the youngest chancellor ever elected. It was enough to make a person explode.

“Lieutenant Nicholson, are you quite all right?” Fletcher asked, looking concerned. “You seem to be looking somewhat shell-shocked.”

Bradley blinked. He was still unused to his new title. His erstwhile superior was now a wanted fugitive and sure to be arrested in due time. “Um, no. Well, just surprised to see you. Sir. It’s good that you’re here, but it’s also very surprising.” 

“Well, you’ve done sterling work,” Fletcher said, and Bradley beamed. “I am most satisfied with your performance. Unfortunately, the news is not so good on my end. It does not look like Czerka will suffer any consequences for their actions on Citadel Station. They have blamed everything on Poofenplotz, and unfortunately, she is far too dead to contradict them. However, I am certain they will not try anything like this again anytime soon. Additionally, they have withdrawn from involvement in the project, voluntarily, in order to avoid negative publicity.”

Bradley breathed a sigh of relief. Czerka managing to weasel out of responsibility wasn’t a huge surprise, but at least they had netted enough bad publicity to no longer want to be a threat to the station’s security. “Thank you for informing me, sir. Deputy Prime Minister Scott is returning to his duties, and wishes to speak to you. The Ithorian government will send replacements for the slain in time.”

Fletcher nodded. He looked distracted. “Where is Milo Murphy? I must speak to him about a matter of critical importance.”

“Ah, you just missed him. He went to the planet’s surface to find his sister. I’m sure he’ll find you on Coruscant when he’s done with that.”

“Yes. Quite. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take that meeting with Scott now.”

Bradley tried not to be too disappointed. He had been hoping for at least a medal, a commendation before the entire Senate, and maybe a huge, whopping bonus. But it wasn’t every day that you got praise from the legendary Ferb Fletcher, so maybe it balanced out.

In any case, he had work to do. Citadel Station wasn’t going to run itself.

*****

If there was one thing that Joni hated more than anything, it was Zeltrons, and the fact that she _was_ one didn’t do anything at all to change that. If anything, it intensified that hatred.

Growing up on Zeltros had been a living nightmare for her. Her peers had been constantly making fools of themselves in pursuit of hedonism and thrill seeking. Joni had preferred to cultivate her mind. Where other Zeltrons had found pleasure in flings with just about every man and woman in sight, Joni had found enjoyment through expanding her intellectual horizons and bettering her mind.

That wasn’t to say that she didn’t _enjoy_ such things. Joni was, despite her fervent wishes otherwise, still a Zeltron, and she was as skilled in the art of romance and seduction as anyone. But it wasn’t a huge priority for her. Nor did she enjoy the mind altering drugs that were often passed around Zeltros like candy. It’s not that they didn’t _affect_ her, but they just didn’t make her _feel_ the same way as her peers.

It wasn’t until she left Zeltros that she realized what the true passion of her life was, the thing that could make her feel better than any other drug in the universe.

It was power.

But not just any kind of power. She would not have been satisfied at all as, for example, Zeltros’ senator. It was the power of life and death that Joni loved, the ability to kill people and, just as importantly, spare their lives, on a whim. It was her quest for that power that had led her to the Society of the Dragon, the galaxy’s foremost criminal organization.

It had been a match made in hell. The Society of the Dragon benefited from her superb administrative skills and utter ruthlessness, and she benefited from their vast network of resources, from which she wove a web that was stretching out through the Outer Rim. And now that she was Telos’s boyar, things were bound to get even better for her.

There was a knock on her door and she looked up with irritation from her paperwork at her secretary and an unremarkable Republic soldier. “This man must speak to you, boyar,” her secretary said. “He has no appointment, but he must be seen nonetheless.”

“If he has no appointment,” Joni said, speaking slowly and condescendingly, “then you must send him away until he has one.”

Suddenly, two things went away. One of them was her secretary’s head, which was ripped off clear off its shoulders by the Republic soldier with his bare hands. The other one was the Republic soldier himself. One moment, there was clearly a Republic soldier in front of her. Joni was certain of this…although now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure _why._ He hadn’t been wearing a uniform, after all. But he had been a Republic soldier; Joni knew that in her bones.

And then he wasn’t, and instead he was Voivode Kyle Drako.

Joni had a blaster in her shoulder holster, a second blaster in an ankle holster, and a third blaster in the drawer of the desk in front of her. She didn’t reach for any of them. It would have been an exercise in futility. If Drako wanted her dead, she might as well start decomposing now and save the worms time.

“Was it truly necessary to kill my secretary?” Joni said coolly. Did she have time to draw the blaster and shoot herself before Drako could kill her? She suspected otherwise, so she merely prayed that her death was not on Drako’s agenda.

“It was not,” Drako admitted. “I merely did it because I wanted to.”

Drako didn’t look like a very imposing figure. Indeed, he looked somewhat silly. He had styled himself after ancient legends of energy vampires, or, perhaps more accurately, clichéd holodramas featuring them. He had slick black hair, chiseled into a widow’s peak in the front, and was dressed like he was out for a night at the opera, wearing a grey vest, a red cummerbund, white gloves, a white shirt, black pants, and a black cape.

Anyone who looked at him and didn’t know him would laugh.

Anyone who looked at him and knew him would scream.

If even a _tenth_ of the legends were true, Drako possessed unfathomable power. Some people even whispered that he was secretly a Sith Lord, and there were reports that he had some sort of strange mesmeric abilities. He certainly was very good at twisting people’s mental perception, as he had just demonstrated.

“You seem so tense, my dear girl,” Drako said, his voice warm and reassuring. That meant absolutely nothing, in Joni’s opinion. He may have chosen to spare her, but he could also be playing with his food, and if some of the other rumors about Drako were true, that was quite literal. “I assure you, there is nothing to worry about. You have done very good work! I am proud of your decision to move against that boor Whitfield. And your work holding back Czerka…nothing short of extraordinary.”

Joni breathed a sigh of relief. “Then you’re not here to execute me?”

“I am not,” Drako assured her. “No, your behavior has been quite exemplary. You even planted the tracking device on the _Ebon Hawk_ in accordance with my orders. The fools do not realize that it was I who sent the message to bring them here to Telos.”

“But you’re not angry that they’re not here now?” Joni asked, confused.

“The goal was never to have them be on Telos. It was to make sure they _weren’t_ on Coruscant. Everything is proceeding exactly as I have planned, my dear.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back. “And now you will die.”

“WHAT?!” Joni shouted. “You said you weren’t here to execute me!”

“And I am not,” Drako said. “I’m not executing you. I’m murdering you. There’s a difference, and you are about to experience it. It’s nothing personal…I just haven’t eaten in _days._ And your soup will be so _tasty…”_

Joni tried to reach for her shoulder holster, but her hand wouldn’t obey her, and she knew that for the very short time left in her life, it never would. Drako had looked like a perfectly normal human up until now, but now a pair of proboscises emerged from his face and darted towards her.

Joni wanted to scream. She couldn’t.

Instead, her body moved eagerly in the direction of the proboscises. She knew, even though her brain was screaming at her otherwise, that if she just moved in their direction, everything she had ever wanted, all the power in the universe could be hers. She should have shot herself the moment Drako walked in the room. But it was too late now.

The proboscises entered into Joni’s nostrils and entered into her cranium. They drained the life force out of her body. It was the most excruciating feeling that she could ever imagine feeling. It felt worse than any torture, any burning, anything that you could name, it was more painful.

And then it was over.

And, very soon afterwards, so was Joni.


	8. Into the Danger Zone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's family reunion time, including feels, bloodshed, and our very special guest star, the Caliginous Automaton of Tomo-Reth!

Milo’s head hurt. His knees hurt. His back hurt. Basically, everything hurt. And he couldn’t be happier about it. Because it meant that he was _alive._ The Jedi may have said that there was no death, only the Force, but in Milo’s experience, they were very, very wrong. There was a great deal of death in the galaxy. He had seen it with his own two eyes. Broken bones, you could heal from. Death, not so much.

And to make matters even better, Zack and Melissa were alive too! The day kept getting better and better.

“Did someone shoot us down?” Melissa said, looking groggy. Had she slept through the _whole crash?_ That was dedication. Milo was honestly impressed. He resolved to ask Melissa her secret as soon as they were back learning about the Force.

“Nah, this is regular old Murphy’s Law in action,” Milo explained. “You’ll get used to it after a while. The secret is to take deep breaths at regular intervals. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but it helps!”

Milo stood up and tried his best to ignore the jet of pain that echoed throughout his entire body. He was better at it than he used to be, but this had been a pretty bad crash. 

They were in a place that probably could have been mistaken for heaven at first glance, it was so beautiful. Milo’s idea of heaven, admittedly, probably involved a ton of ancient ruins to sift through, but it was close. Not only did it have Zack in it (and Milo was sure that his mere presence made any space 3.625798 times more heavenly than average), but it contained grass of the most beautiful green, rock faces of the most amazing brown, ravenous beasts that were heading his way, and Zack.

It was nice to be back in the great outdoors again. Milo was a nature person at heart. He was never happier than when he was breathing fresh air and enjoying…

Hang on a second. There was something he was missing. Oh, that’s right! The ravenous beasts that were heading his way.

Man, where _was_ his head today?

Milo had forgotten more about xenobiology than most people ever learned, and unfortunately one of those things was the identity of the horrid creatures heading this way. They were squat, bloated creatures with dull, yellow-green wrinkled and bumpy hides. They had four three-toed feet, short and stubby tails, and a thick, bony ridge traveling down their back, from which thin, fleshy spines protruded. Their heads had an upward-facing jaw, connected low on the skull, and thin, sharp, needle-like teeth jutting from the lower jaw which protruded over their upper lip. Their eyes stood on short stalks and moved independently of one another.

Darn it, what _was_ the name of these things? It was going to haunt him all day. It started with a C, he remembered that much.

“MILO, WATCH OUT!” Melissa screamed. Her vibrosword glinted in the light as she cut off the creature’s head. But then another one of them lunged at her from behind, knocking her to the ground and sending the vibrosword spinning out of her hand. 

Zack blasted away at the creatures, but his shots kept on bouncing off their hides. It would have been quite impressive, really, if Zack hadn’t been in mortal danger because of it. Ah, the natural world was a beautiful thing, even when it was trying to kill you.

Milo took a deep breath. He _really_ did not like using Murphy’s Law in combat situations, as a deliberate weapon. Using it against non-sentient mechanical devices was one thing. Using it against another living being, even one without sentience, was quite another. He was terrified that he’d end up slipping into the dark side. But there was no other choice.

He couldn’t quite say how it worked, not with words. One moment, he saw the Restoration Zone as it was. The next moment, he saw it in the Force. The Force whispered knowledge to Milo, the knowledge of how to rend anything he saw or touched. He knew instantaneously how to send the whole mountain crashing down on their heads, for example. It would barely take any effort at all. _Do it,_ the Force whispered. No, I should be more specific. The _dark side_ whispered. 

It wasn’t just mountains that he could destroy by using the full force of Murphy’s Law. It would _not_ be as easy as causing a rockslide, and it would kill him to do so (something of a moot point considering that he’d die anyway) but he could crack the planet in two. That wasn’t hyperbole. He could _do it._ That was the strength of Murphy’s Law. It didn’t just _bring_ destruction. It _was_ destruction.

In comparison, crushing the hearts of seven angry beasts ( _why_ couldn’t he remember their names?!) could be done with a flick of his wrist.

Who knows what would have happened if he had destroyed the creatures? Certainly not I. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. It’s certainly what _would_ have happened. And in many other universes, it might have happened. 

But in this universe, he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a very familiar sound.

It was the barking of a dog. 

Not just any dog, though. This dog was very familiar to Milo indeed. The ferocity with which it moved against the creatures, however, was not. The dog attacked with relentless abandon, ripping out throats and biting with such ferocity that it practically teared one of the creatures in half. The creatures never stood a chance.

“Diogee!” Milo shouted, his voice filled with glee. “You’re not supposed to be coming to the rescue…but I’m glad you did!” 

Diogee, the one quarter Endorian camelid dog that had been a fixture in Milo’s life for the majority of his life, licked Milo’s face with the enthusiasm that only a dog that had been away from one of his best friends for so long could exhibit. 

Although, once Milo could get him to stop jumping over him, he noticed that Diogee looked…very different than before. In fact, he didn’t look like a dog at all upon closer examination. He could hear the whirring of servos when Diogee moved.

“Is that a droid?” Zack asked, looking befuddled.

“Technically speaking,” a voice said from behind Diogee, “he’s a cyborg.”

Milo looked into the face of a short, slight woman with medium length blond hair, blue eyes, a blue and white shirt, purple slacks, and matching shoes and socks. She was smiling. There were tears in her eyes.

“Hi, Milo,” Sara Murphy said. “Welcome home.”

******

This is Sara Murphy: 

She is the person that Milo is closest to in all the galaxy. She has been there for him much longer than anyone else, much more effectively than any of the morons in the Jedi Order. She knows, more than anyone, the truth of his heart, the infinite love within, the kindness that he doesn’t even have to _think_ about before invoking. No one knows Milo Murphy better than his older sister. 

She is, in other words, the most likely person to believe in Murphy’s Law.

So it is therefore very strange indeed that she does not.

Perhaps that is not the best way to put it. She does not deny that Murphy’s Law _exists._ She has been in enough accidents, experienced enough bizarre quirks of fortune with Milo in the vicinity to acknowledge the truth that is right in front of her eyes. To the best of her knowledge, which, while limited, is still better than anyone else’s, Milo’s midi-chlorians interact with negative probability ions in a way that creates an intensification of his entropic field. She does not take issue with the science of Milo’s condition.

What she takes issue with is the concept that Milo is unlucky. 

When Sara was ten, she had been living with her parents on a planet in the Outer Rim. Their people weren’t uncivilized by any means, but they had given little thought to the wider galaxy and anything going on there. Her father Martin had been a safety inspector, and her mother Brigette had been an architect. The three of them lived in contentment and happiness, and nothing seemed like it would ever change it.

Then the Mandalorians invaded.

It had been one of their first attacks, long before the Republic had finally mobilized their troops to fight against them, back in the days when Mechanus had been just another Jedi with a bizarre and unprecedented gift for creating technology. But even though it was in the early days of the invasion, the Mandalorians already had the gift for carnage and slaughter that they would later became known for. They swept through the planet’s defenses like they were made of tissue paper and then went from town to town, looking for recruits, resources, and slaves.

When they arrived at Sara’s town, they lined up all the inhabitants in the town square. Every third person, man, woman, or child, was killed. The remaining two thirds were taken into slavery. 

Sara’s parents had been preparing for a Mandalorian invasion since the moment they first heard the whispering of the implacable masked marauders, and their foresight saved her life. 

It did not save their own.

While they waited in a fallout shelter that they had built under their house before Sara had even been born, they heard the blaster fire above them, and Sara could see just how much each bolt fired broke her parents, as they worried about which of their friends could be being executed as they spoke. She knew that they wanted nothing more than to grab blasters from their armory and go out there to fight the Mandalorians. She also knew that such a course of action would be suicide. 

For three hours, no one bothered to say a word. They told themselves that it was because they didn’t want to run the risk of someone somehow overhearing them, but they knew it was a lie. It was because if someone spoke, then it would be _real_ instead of just a horrible, horrible nightmare. 

And then there was an explosion as the Mandalorians broke through the first of their defenses.

It was definitely not a good time to foist a shocking revelation on someone, let alone a ten-year-old scared out of their wits. And yet they did it anyway. They told Sara about his brother at the Jedi Temple, and charged her with protecting Milo. They sent her down a secret passageway, and that was the last she ever saw of them. She could have looked back as she heard the blaster fire and the explosions behind her. She chose not to, and she has never regretted it.

Over the next seven years, she and Milo would become inseparable. She was with him through the horrors of war, helped ease his immense pain of being rejected from the Jedi Order, and when a potential boyfriend ran away screaming at the first maalraas attack, she was there to comfort him and assure him that he’d eventually find someone who could weather every storm of Murphy’s Law. 

And she watched as he escaped dangerous situation after dangerous situation. The laws of probability, especially the skewed ones around Milo, suggested that he would eventually run into something that killed him. And yet he did not. An entire boat might go down and Milo would somehow wash ashore. He might fall off a cliff and wind up with two broken legs, yes, but still keep his life. 

Milo, in other words, is the luckiest person she has ever met. 

Neither Sara nor Milo believe that Murphy’s Law is a curse, but Sara isn’t so sure it’s a blessing. She gets the impression sometimes that it’s _waiting_ for something, or that it’s been preparing Milo for something that she can barely even conceive of. 

She does not want to be in the same _universe_ as him when that something arrives.

But she will be, and she knows it. She is no more incapable of protecting him when he needs it than she is of flying under her own power. 

If anyone is cursed from Murphy’s law, it is Sara. Her life has not been hers alone. It has been defined by Milo. Yes, she has pursued her own interests. She may not be Phineas’ equal in mechanical engineering, but she’s one of the best in the field and she knows it. And she’s had the last five years to be alone and to learn who she is without Milo. She does not resent him. She cannot, for she loves him with all her heart. 

Yet…she cannot help but wonder what would have happened if the Mandalorians didn’t invade. If her parents hadn’t died. If they hadn’t saddled her with the knowledge of a sibling she never should have known about.

At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t matter. Sara Murphy is Milo Murphy’s sister, and she’s okay with that. She’s okay with that, because she is also herself, the girl who loves cheesy romantic holodramas, the girl who was so reluctant to lose her dog when it was nearing the end of his life that she implanted his brain into a droid body, the girl who has fought the galaxy tooth and nail when anyone told her what she couldn’t be.

Sara Murphy knows what she is. She has always known.

She is a Murphy. 

*****

“So…” Zack said, feeling inexplicably tongue-tied. “You’re Milo’s sister. You used to live here, then? Why else would you say welcome home?”

“Sara says that whenever you’re with family, and/or people you love, you’re home,” Milo explained. “I’ve been home for a while now, though, Sara.” Wait, did that mean what Zack thought it meant? _Play it cool, Zack,_ he thought. 

“You have a cyborg dog,” Zack said, and he mentally slapped himself. What _was_ it about Milo that left him unable to form sentences in the ways he wanted to? 

Diogee licked his face with his tongue. _Was_ it still a tongue? It looked pretty much like a tongue, but who knows what sort of mechanical wizardry was inside that thing. Cyborg or not, it was a cute dog. Zack figured that anyone who had a dog like that couldn’t be _entirely_ untrustworthy.

“He’s a sweetie-pie,” Sara said, smiling fondly. “Everyone should have an immortal cyborg dog. The galaxy would be a better place if they did.”

“These are my friends, Zack Underwood and Melissa Chase,” Milo said. Melissa nodded curtly at Sara. She seemed very distracted. She was staring intently at Sara almost as if she was expecting her to do something, and was perturbed now that she wasn’t doing it. Zack wished he knew what was going on in her head.

“I see,” Sara said. “Melissa, Milo, how’s about you patch up your wounds? Zack and I need to have a chat.” She led him away from Melissa and Milo at a very brisk pace with a _very_ solid grip on Zack’s arm until they were far enough away not to be overheard.

Sara crossed her arms. “What’s going on between you and Milo? I saw that look on your face. And, yes, before you ask, I know that he’s gay. I knew before _he_ did. He’s been out to me for as long as he’s known there’s something to be out _about.”_

Well, that certainly made things easier. Zack hadn’t expected to be getting a shovel talk from Milo’s sister, but he supposed that in the absence of their parents, she was the only available candidate. He had gotten them before, but they didn’t get any more fun with experience. “Right now,” Zack said, speaking carefully, “there’s nothing going on between us. I suspect that’ll change soon enough. He wanted to wait until we found you, and now you’re found.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I love him,” Zack said immediately. “I’m in love with him.” And he knew that it was the truth. It had snuck up on him, but now that he was facing it full in the face, he couldn’t deny it: He loved Milo Murphy with all his heart. “I want to spend the rest of my life together, and that _terrifies me._ Every instinct I have is screaming at me to run, but _I can’t._ I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, it scares the kriff out of me, and I’d do anything to keep feeling it for the rest of my life.”

Sara’s eyes narrowed. “There are some ground rules. You’re _not_ allowed to die on him. You _cannot_ walk away when it gets really dangerous. And I _will_ be Milo’s honor attendant at your wedding. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Zack said. 

Sara clapped him on the shoulder so hard that he stumbled for a second and then led him back over to Milo. She gave him a thumbs up. “This one’s a keeper, Milo!” Zack couldn’t help but beam with pride.

Milo gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry about that, Zack. I should have warned you. Sara can get overprotective sometimes. She says when it comes to picking men, I’m all thumbs.”

“That’s because you _are,_ Milo, and this _one_ exception is a fluke, nothing more. So what’s going on that’s so urgent that you traveled across the galaxy just to see your favorite sister?”

Milo explained everything that had happened since he had woken up on Peragus. He did, however, leave out the part where Zack had a panic attack outside of the facility, for which Zack was profoundly grateful. It was bad enough that _Milo_ knew about his paralyzing fear of heights. He wasn’t at all ready for a complete stranger to know…even if one day, maybe she would be his sister-in-law?

Nope. The idea was still too alien in his head to be contemplated. Zack knew that the only way he’d be able to work through this new relationship would be one step at a time. He would focus on becoming Milo’s boyfriend. Boyfriend he could handle. Husband, well, he wasn’t quite ready for that yet. 

But maybe one day he would be.

“Wow,” Sara summarized once Milo was finished explaining everything. “I mean, I figured some heavy hitters were after you, but I thought that it was the Hutts or something. This is… _existential_ crap. And I will be here to help you through it. Game plan?”

Melissa seemed to finally work her way out of whatever state she had been in before. To look at her, one would never know that _something_ had been disturbing her about Sara. What was it? What had she been _thinking_?

Whatever it was, she wasn’t thinking it now. “We need a ship to take us to the hub of the Polar Irrigation System. Our associate is there.” Interesting that she didn’t say friend. “He’s in danger, and we have to rescue him.”

Sara was silent for a while. “Well, I know you did great work on Citadel Station, but it hasn’t filtered down here yet. This place is crawling with Ryyk forces and they all want me very, _very_ dead. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to tangle with them, because the only place that has a shuttle that I know of is the abandoned military base. Or at least it _was_ abandoned before Ryyk set up shop right outside it.” 

Milo scowled. “I can’t believe we have to do _more_ fighting. Can’t we negotiate with these guys?”

“I think the only thing we can negotiate with them is how slow our deaths will be…and that’s if we’re lucky,” Sara said, sounding sad. She had served in the Mandalorian Wars, yes, but she hadn’t been a _soldier._ Zack knew what those looked like. They didn’t look like Sara. Sometimes, they thought they did. _Zack_ had once thought he did.

They were always wrong.

*****

It was quite relaxing to walk through the Restoration Zone. Milo felt calmer than he had felt since this whole mess started. True, every so often they had to carve their way through a nest of those creatures whose names _continued_ to evade him, and sometimes they were forced to fight a group of mercenaries who just refuse to respond to reason, but you had to take the good with the bad.

And there was a heck of a lot of good for once. He was spending time with his sister for the first time in five years, which was good. She was safe and sound, or at least no more unsafe than Milo himself, which was great. And she approved of Zack, which was amazing. Sara had a sixth sense when it came to Milo’s potential romantic partners, and she had never, to Milo’s knowledge, been wrong. If she approved of Zack, then Zack was worth it. 

So what if a megacorporation, homicidal plants, and the galaxy’s most evil criminals were after him? Together, they could defeat any challenge. Milo knew it as surely as he knew his own name.

They rounded a corner and Milo stopped in his tracks. There was a beach in front of him, and it beckoned to him somehow. He could feel it in the Force. This place was significant somehow. Or it would be for him. The Force was sometimes hard to interpret, but it was always worth listening to. It would never lie to him or lead him astray. 

Melissa must have felt the same thing, because she nodded at Milo, then pointed over to a mercenary encampment quite a ways away. “Sara, how’s about we clear that camp out and let the boys rest for a while? Just us girls!”

Sara smirked. “Yeah, okay. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Once Sara and Melissa were gone, Zack wondered, _“Is_ there anything she wouldn’t do?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Milo admitted. “Sit down next to me?”

Zack nodded and the two of them sat on the sandy beach, watching the waves come in and out. Milo could feel the Force coursing through his bones. It was watching him, and waiting. Milo wasn’t sure what it was waiting for, but he knew that the Force thought that it was worth waiting for.

Milo didn’t need to know anyway.The Force could take care of itself. There was something far more important to deal with: his relationship with Zack. He had definitely not been lying to Zack about being uncomfortable rushing into a relationship with Sara in danger, but there was more to it than that. Zack was the _one._ He could sense it, as if the Force was telling him. For all he knew, that could be exactly what it was doing. His relationship with Zack wouldn’t be some passing fling. It would be one of the most important things in his life.

And he was scared.

The truth of the matter is that while Milo has convinced himself that he’s been in love before, he was lying to himself. No, that’s too harsh. He wasn’t telling the full truth, that’s all. He had felt a deep affection and a physical attraction to the boyfriends he had had, but he had never allowed himself to _truly_ be in love, not in the way he was in love with Zack. 

The reason for that was simple: It was to protect himself. When Sebastian had fallen off the cliff to his death, it had been devastating and he had genuinely mourned, but it didn’t _shatter_ him. When Igor had left him, calling him a freak and a jinx and a dozen much less polite names than that, Milo had been distraught, but he had eventually picked up the pieces and moved on with his life.

But if _Zack_ had died, if Zack had decided that he was just too dangerous to love…Milo would fracture. He would break, and he would never be able to be repaired.

It was a risk worth taking.

Milo was a bit rusty in the flirting department, but he figured it was like riding a swoop bike. Once you learned, you never forgot. And he thought he had the perfect hook to reel in Zack. Not that it would take much, he figured. “You know,” he said, pitching his voice deliberately lower than usual, “I had my first kiss on a beach. And it was terrible. Really awful.”

“That so?” Zack said, and thank the Force, he seemed to know exactly what was going on here. Other than flirting with a guy who turned out to be straight, there was nothing more awkward than flirting with someone who was oblivious. 

“Yeah, it’s really put me off the idea of beach kisses.”

“Well, I bet I can change your mind.” 

Milo batted his eyelashes. “And what do you intend to wager, Mr. Underwood?” 

Zack crossed his arms, and why the _hell_ did that totally innocuous motion have to be so distractingly sexy? “I bet that I can blow this guy out of the water, and if I win, you’ll be my boyfriend.”

Milo was more than willing to take that bet. He didn’t bother telling Zack that his first kiss had been from a girl. She was sweet, she was smart, she was kind, and Milo had felt absolutely nothing when he had kissed her. He had been suspecting that he was gay for a while, but that kiss had been the smoking blaster proving that theory. 

Milo’s expectations had been pretty high going into the kiss with Zack. After all, Zack had likely gotten plenty of practice in before. He was expecting something passionate, sensual, something that made his heart flutter with excitement, and Zack didn’t meet any of those expectations.

He exceeded them in every aspect.

It wasn’t just _passion_ that he felt in the kiss, but love. He could feel, perhaps through the Force, perhaps just through instinct, that Zack loved him with every pore of his being. His heart was not just fluttering with excitement, it was like a jackhammer in his chest pounding away. If he had been middle aged, he would have been worrying that he was having a heart attack. And as for sensuality, well, let’s just say he was _very_ much hoping that Melissa wasn’t listening in on his feelings through their bond, because she probably would have been _very_ uncomfortable if she had been.

“Well?” Zack asked. “Did I win?”

“Nope.” 

Zack’s mouth opened in shock. He looked almost distraught. “What? How was that not a good kiss?”

“You cheated,” Milo explained. “If I had known you were the best kisser in the galaxy, I never would have taken the bet.”

Zack waved his finger in Milo’s direction. “You lost fair and square, mister. Admit it!” 

“How’s about you kiss me again, now that you aren’t hiding any more surprises, boyfriend? Just to make things fair.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Zack drawled. “I think I can still find ways to surprise you, boyfriend.”

The universe was a cornucopia of impossibilities. Life should never have found a way to exist, much less prosper in the way it did, and yet it did. A sentient energy field went against the laws of physics, and yet it existed. And Zack’s kiss should not have been even better the second time around, and yet it was. 

*****

Blood sprayed in the air as Melissa beheaded the last mercenary in the camp with a disturbingly blank expression. Sara didn’t like having to use violence, but she wasn’t a stranger to it, and she knew better than anyone the depravities the Ryyk Company was capable of. She’d seen what they’d done to intruders in the Restoration Zone, though every day she wished she had not.

The Ithorians had reached out to Sara shortly after she had parted ways with Milo. They were in need of experts for the Telos restoration project in a plethora of fields, including mechanical engineering. She had found that while they were absolute sweethearts with hearts of gold, they seemed blind to the greedy ways of the galaxy. She’d been helping them pick up the slack, monitoring the Restoration Zone for sabotage, but for every act of sabotage she thwarted, Czerka was able to accomplish two more. In fact, she’d been thinking about just giving up when Scott had contacted her out of the blue and informed her that Milo was looking for her.

As much as Sara would have liked to think that she could stop being surprised by her brother’s bizarre turns of fortune, he always found new ways to surprise her. She’d never have _ever_ taken a bet that he would be accompanied by the Zack Underwood, the Outer Rim’s most crafty smuggler, much less that the two of them were deliriously in love with each other. But far more surprising was Milo’s _other_ companion.

Sara turned to face the woman who was now calling herself Melissa Chase and gave her a piercing stare. “Are we seriously going to keep pretending that we don’t know each other?”

Melissa’s lips twitched in a brief smile. “I think we are, actually. You see, Milo doesn’t remember me, and for now, it’s probably best to keep it that way.”

“What do you mean, he doesn’t _remember_ you?” Sara asked incredulously. 

Sara didn’t see how that was possible. Melissa may have shed her old name and have changed her look, but there was no mistaking her. She had been Milo’s only friend throughout his time in the Jedi Order. She had even given him his first and last kiss with a girl, as an experiment to figure out Milo’s sexuality. How could Milo just _forget_ all those years of friendship? 

“You,” Melissa said, her voice acquiring a strange tone, and waving her hand in a very familiar gesture, “don’t remember me either.” 

Sara slapped her, hard enough to leave a mark. Melissa looked incredulous, as if they had been working from a script right until the part where Sara had stepped off of it. “Are you seriously trying to _brainwash_ me? I was in the Jedi Temple for _years._ You think I can’t recognize a mind trick when I see it? If you’re a threat to my brother…” She raised her blaster and pointed it at Melissa’s chest for emphasis. 

Melissa shook her head fervently. “No! I am not a threat to Milo, Sara. Even if you never believe anything else I am saying, believe this: I would sooner die than lay a finger on him.”

“You…love him, don’t you?” Sara realized. 

“Not in the way Zack does, but yes,” Melissa admitted. “I want a lot of things, and you will _not_ be happy when I get them all, but more than _anything_ I want to help Milo. I will kill the galaxy if that’s what it takes. I’ll rip it in _half_ if I have to!” 

Sara believed her, and it terrified her. Melissa had always had a glimmer of instability to her, but it seemed to have destabilized into incipient megalomania. She hadn’t _fallen_ to the dark side yet, but she was teetering over the ledge. The smartest thing to do would be to put a blaster bolt through Melissa’s head right then and there.

But…she couldn’t. Maybe it was because she remembered the child that Melissa had been. She had been incredibly adorable. She still was, really, which just made her more terrifying. Maybe it was because Melissa had been one of Milo’s strongest allies and best friends, one of the very few people who had defended him all along and could weather the endless storm that was Murphy’s Law. Maybe it was because she was just sick of violence. Or maybe it was because Melissa was controlling her mind. She very much hoped it wasn’t that last one.

But whatever the reason, she still couldn’t do it. She lowered the blaster and glared at Melissa. “If you _ever_ try to whammy me again, I’m going to feed you to the goddamn cannocks. Got it?”

“Fair enough,” Melissa said, looking completely calm. No one would ever have been able to guess that someone had been pointing a blaster at her just seconds earlier. “I think the two lovebirds have had enough time to themselves. Shall we go get them?”

Sara nodded, but kept her eye on Milo’s once and current best friend. She believed Melissa when she said she wasn’t a threat to Milo. But she was starting to think that Melissa may well have been a threat to everyone else.

*****

Milo wasn’t the best kisser in the galaxy, but he more than made up for it with enthusiasm and the fact that the was _Milo._ Zack could not believe his luck. _Milo Murphy_ was now his boyfriend, and it made him feel like singing, were he not mortally afraid that someone would connect his singing with the parts of his past that he was still trying to hide.

If Milo ever found out about that part of his past, he would be _so screwed._ Milo would never understand. He was too good and decent and pure to understand.

Someone tapped Zack on the shoulder and he shrieked, then turned around to face Sara. She had been lagging behind Milo and Zack as they walked across the Restoration Zone on their way to the military base, with Melissa in front, but now she was walking side by side with Zack. Milo, probably misinterpreting what was going on, just smiled at Zack and walked ahead.

“How much do you trust Melissa?” Sara asked.

“Not one bit,” Zack said, feeling relieved. He had been worried that Melissa would somehow charm Sara into taking her side. By the looks of it, though, the opposite had happened. “She’s about ten seconds away from completely falling to the dark side at any given moment, and anytime someone asks her about her past, she dodges the questions.”

“There’s a good reason for that,” Sara said, her voice sounding grave. “It’s because she knew Milo. They were best friends back in the Temple.”

Zack stopped in his tracks in surprise. “Keep going or she’ll get suspicious, man!” Sara said urgently, and that was enough to get Zack moving once again.

“I don’t understand. How does Milo not recognize her? Did she brainwash him?”

Sara looked uncertain. “I don’t know. I want to say _yes._ I mean, she tried to brainwash _me._ But…I don’t know. I’m thinking that he just blocked out the memories. Does he remember about the Mass Shadow Generator?”

Zack nodded. “It must have been very traumatic for him. That’d mess anybody up.”

“It is _not his fault,”_ Sara said vehemently. “People said it was, but it _wasn’t._ Milo isn’t responsible for the activation of the Mass Shadow Generator, and if you _ever_ say he is, I’m ripping your larynx out.”

“Whoa, there!” Zack said, holding his hands up frantically. He did _not_ want his larynx ripped out, and he knew that Sara was being quite serious when she threatened to do it. She was more than capable of doing it too. “I agree with you. It’s not his fault. I’m not just saying that.”

Sara did the last thing that he expected from her. She gave him a hug, a very tight one. Zack could feel the tears streaming down from her cheek as they fell on his shirt. “You’re a good man, Zack. You’re a perfect fit for him. I hope the two of you will be happy together.”

Zack wasn’t used to relatives of his paramours actually _liking_ him. Normally, they thought he was, at best, an untrustworthy rapscallion. At worst, they wanted to mount his head on their walls, sometimes very literally. “What should we do about Melissa?” he asked in a desperate attempt to change the subject.

“Nothing, for the moment,” Sara said, sounding like saying it was costing her something. “I believe her when she says that she wants to keep Milo safe, even if I don’t believe her about anything else. Now stay sharp! We’re here.”

They were indeed there. Ahead of them was an encampment filled to the brim with Ryyk mercenaries, and they looked…well, they actually looked _nervous_ , now that Zack thought about it. Word must have finally reached them of Czerka getting kicked off Citadel Station and with it, the end of their jobs. Milo had insisted that they negotiate before killing everyone. Zack wasn’t _against_ the idea, but that’s not the same thing as thinking that it would _work._ Still, one didn’t get anywhere in the Outer Rim’s criminal fraternity without developing some skills in smooth talking.

He walked into the mercenary encampment, alone, bold as brass, his hands in the air. He had a holdout blaster on his ankle, and Sara was covering him with a sniper rifle she had taken from a dead mercenary, but he knew that if things went terribly wrong, he would be dead long before he could even reach the blaster or Sara could fire a shot. Ah, the things he did for love.

“Stop right there,” the mercenary commander said, his voice distorted by his mask. It was a Mandalorian mask, but the armor was not Mandalorian armor. Likely, the commander had picked up the mask as a war trophy. “This is a restricted area. Leave or be shot.”

“Yeah, we could go that way,” Zack said. “But if we did, it’d end badly for both of us. See, I can’t leave. I’ve got people. They’ll kill you. But you’d kill me before they could do that. See what I mean? We both lose. _Or_ you could listen to me, and we both can win.”

Zack couldn’t see the expression on the commander’s face, but it didn’t matter. The fact that he was alive not to see it was all the proof he needed that the commander was on the hook. “Go on,” the commander said.

Zack couldn’t help but smirk, and he didn’t even bother trying to hide it. “See, my friends and I are operatives for Republic Intelligence. Milo, Melissa, step out here!” The two of them stepped out from their hiding spots. “Milo Murphy and Melissa Chase are both Jedi Masters. And they’ll prove it to you!”

Before anyone could do anything else, there was an explosion and all the windows in the makeshift barracks building in the back of the encampment blew outwards in a shower of shards. Murphy’s Law could come in handy sometimes, Zack reflected. 

“We’re here to get a shuttle to rescue our coworker. He’s in the polar regions. If you help us, then we’ll personally mention your involvement to the chancellor when he debriefs us. Who knows? Maybe there’d be some work for your company from the Republic in the future. I can’t promise anything, but, well, Baljeet is a close personal friend of Chancellor Fletcher, and he knows how to show his gratitude.” 

Without Melissa and Milo there to sell the con, they probably would have been toast, but their presence as Jedi lent him much-needed credibility, especially since the commander had to know full well who Zack was. Greed took care of the rest. And Zack had been proposing a fair deal. He hadn’t been lying either, at least not about telling Fletcher. It was no skin off his nose to keep his word, and who knows, maybe Fletcher really _would_ be grateful enough to hoist some intelligence work on Ryyk Company. And the commander didn’t need to do anything other than just let them past.

“All right,” the commander said eventually. “Agreed. But that place is a deathtrap, and if anything happens to you in there, I’m not responsible. Got it?”

That sounded reasonable enough to Zack, who nodded. The idea of a walking into a deathtrap probably would have scared him just weeks prior, but, really, any enclosed space that he was with Milo in was a deathtrap by default. How much worse could this military base be?

Sara came out of the shadows, wielding a sniper rifle that was nearly as big as she was, with Diogee by her side. She waved at the mercenaries, who stonily ignored her.

“See?” Milo said, sounding just a trifle smug. “I told you they’d listen to reason. Didn’t I?”

Zack kissed Milo, reveling in the fact that he was finally able to do it. “Yes, you did, sweetheart. Yes, you did.” 

*****

If Milo had refused to go into places because they were potential deathtraps, he’d never go anywhere at all. Sure enough, the so-called “deathtrap” that the commander had warned them about had turned out to be wholly overblown. Oh, sure, there were vents that spewed poison into the room, but if you didn’t know how to avoid a basic deathtrap like that, you had no business in the adventuring business at all. And, yes, there were war droids shooting at them. But those were the _negatives._ It’s not as if the droids actually posed a _threat._ Even _without_ Murphy’s Law working on them, they were in such bad condition that they probably would have fallen apart anyway.

Milo didn’t become the person he was today by focusing on the negatives. He wasn’t blind to them, of course, but he had faced down gangsters, mercenaries, and Pistachions without flinching. If he was going to cower over a couple of old droids, well, that’d be just _silly._

And the base was absolutely fascinating from a historical standpoint. The droids bore quite a strong resemblance to the Krath war droids that had caused mass casualties at the Jedi conclave on Deneba during the beginning of the Great Sith Wars over fifty years prior, although they were much more cheaply made and, as he and Melissa amply demonstrated, were no match for even former Jedi. If he had to hazard a guess, he would assume that Mechanus had made them, a theory supported by the ostentatious gold and red decor that Mechanus was so fond of. Perhaps in retrospect, they should have paid more attention to his choice in interior decoration.

All in all, things were going pretty darn well for Milo. He was back adventuring alongside his sister, Melissa seemed to be getting along much better with everyone, and _Zack was his boyfriend now._ Sometimes, Milo had to pinch himself just to make sure that he hadn’t dreamt it. But it was real, all right. 

Even the news that they had to activate the reactor to open the hangar bay doors Milo took in stride. He would get the chance to ride in a shuttle that looked itself like it dated back to the Great Sith Wars. Now if only they could find the throne room that Mechanus always kept in all of his military bases (yet another sign that they probably should have paid attention to), that would be just the icing on the cake.

“You sound like you’re in an even better mood than usual, Milo,” Melissa commented. 

“I just have a good feeling about all this,” Milo explained. “We’re so close to finding Baljeet, and my family’s together! And that includes you, Melissa. You’re family now.”

Melissa looked…angry…for a second. Now _that_ was weird. “I’m family _now,_ am I?” she said, her voice a whisper. “Oh, Milo.” Then she shook her head, and the anger was gone from her face, replaced by a bright smile. “I’m honored. I’ll try to be worthy of your trust.” Milo could sense that she meant it. 

“Whoever designed this reactor security is a moron,” Zack said, as he sliced through the computer systems controlling the reactor. “I mean, this security would have been shitty when it was _built.”_

“You can’t hack externally into something like this, even now,” Sara pointed out. “Any intruders would have to access it in person. Less need for security. They probably were relying on their physical defenses to take care of such things.”

And when they got back to the hangar, they found out just what the defenses in question were. One of the walls had fully retracted, revealing the missing throne room. In keeping with Mechanus’s style, it was bejeweled with gold and rubies, and twenty feet in the air to boot. 

But Milo wasn’t interested in any of that. He was far more interested in the absolutely colossal droid that had been sitting on the throne, so high that it was practically scraping the very tall hangar ceilings. Its avian face reminded Milo of a statue he had once seen of the Talortai, a very long lived race of Force Sensitive Warriors. And it looked very familiar too…

Wait a second. 

Hold the comlink.

From a certain angle, it kind of looked like…YES! YES, IT WAS!

“Zack!” Milo said, his voice overflowing with excitement. “Look! It’s the Caliginous Automaton of Tomo-Reth! It was supposed to have been destroyed over ten thousand years ago in the Herglic Crush.”

“And…exactly what does it _do?”_ Zack asked.

“Oh, it breathes fire.”

“I had to ask.”

"CANNOCKS!" Milo suddenly shouted. "That's what those beasts were called. Man, I'm glad I remembered that. It's been bugging me all day."

The Caliginous Automaton lifted its beak and its eyes turned red.


	9. Ice to Be Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Milo has a run in with an old teacher who seems to have become even harsher than before, which sort of cycles from horrifying to impressive back to horrifying again when you consider how harsh she was before.

_Well, this is it,_ Zack thought stoically. _I’m finally going to die._ And, to be fair, he could think of a _ton_ of worse deaths than being burned alive by the Kinesthetic Automaton of Wherever, or whatever Milo had called the huge droid staring at him with its fiery red eyes. At least it would be instantaneous. When you compared it to the death he would have gotten if Milo hadn’t stopped him from falling into space on Peragus, it was practically fun.

He closed his eyes and waited for the end. It never came. Instead, a buzzing sound emerged from the droid and it started scanning Milo. “Match found,” the droid said. “Milo Murphy, Jedi Padawan, vergence. Category: Asset, special category A-7. Padawan Murphy, in accordance with the orders of my master Lord Mechanus, you are to be given full operational control of this facility. I am yours to command.”

And then it _knelt_ before him.

“Milo,” Sara said, her voice quiet, as if she was afraid of the answer, “why did _Darth Mechanus_ give you _full operational control of his facilities?”_

“It could be an equipment malfunction,” Zack suggested, not believing his words for a solitary second. “You know, Murphy’s Law making it go haywire?”

Milo turned not towards the Gelatinous Automaton, not to Zack, not to Sara, but to Melissa. “What’s going on here, Melissa? Why did Mechanus think I’m a _vergence?_ What the heck _is_ a vergence?”

Melissa stared at him for a few seconds. For once, she appeared to be completely lost for words. “A vergence is a place, an object, or a person around which the Force flows more freely,” she said eventually, sounding like she was reciting an explanation that she had heard in a lesson in one of her Jedi classes. “Why Mechanus thought _you_ were one of them, I don’t know. I never met the man.”

“It’s Murphy’s Law, isn’t it?” Zack realized. Everyone stared at him. “Oh, come on, I may not know much about the Force, but I’m not _stupid._ I mean, what else could it _be?_ ”

“Tell us everything that you know about Murphy’s Law,” Milo commanded the Autonomous Automaton, which opened its beak to speak. They never found out what it would have said.

Instead, a thunderous explosion echoed through the facility as a rocket coursed through the air and smashed into the Cartilaginous Automaton’s head, turning it into a mess of circuitry. “NO!” Milo screamed, looking incredibly distraught. And no wonder. Not only had one of their best sources of info on Murphy’s been destroyed, but it had also been one of the Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy, which had to _really_ get Milo’s choreamnos.

Far more distressing, however, was the identity of the individual wielding the rocket launcher. “That’s not possible!” Zack said. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

A droid that looked exactly like Norman waved the hand not holding his rocket launcher at them. “Well, that’s silly! My name is Norman, but you can also call me Legion if you want, for we are many! It’s great that you finally showed up! Since I got rid of that stinker for you, how’s about giving me a ride to your destination with you?! Or I can kill you all and just take the shuttle for myself! Yeah, I think I’ll just do that instead!”

He lifted the rocket launcher, but then he lowered it again. “Nope, just messing with you! I’m such a joker! No, I need you there with me, or the shuttle will be shot down! But I only need Milo alive, so if you don’t let me go with you, I’ll slowly torture the rest of you to death!”

Zack really was starting to hate this guy. But what other choice did he have? Norman had a rocket launcher, and they didn’t. “Fine, but I don’t think there’s room for all of us _and_ your rocket launcher.”

“Not to worry! I’ll just kill you all until there’s enough room!” He aimed the rocket launcher at Zack’s head. He gulped. Then Norman tossed the rocket launcher across the room. “Yet another joke! I’m a funny guy, aren’t I?! I don’t need this rocket launcher! I’ve got more weapons in my body than most people will ever handle in their whole lives! Let’s go!”

Zack wanted to fight against Norman, but he knew that it wasn’t a fight that they were likely to win. Perhaps if they still had the Mysterious Automaton on their side, but even then, Norman was deadly enough to wipe out a whole mining facility with no resistance, and the Suspicious Automaton was over ten thousand years old. It could have broken down any second. No, the odds were most definitely against them. And for all he knew, Norm could have reinforcements lurking somewhere in the military base. They had no choice but to wait for a more opportune moment.

“Wait a second,” Milo said, sounding as if he was approaching some sort of revelation. “Those alloys were _not_ naturally occurring on Tomo-Reth according to our accounts of that civilization! In fact, several of them were discovered practically contemporaneously! _That wasn’t the Caliginous Automaton at all!_ It was some… _replica!_ ” He spat the word as if it was a swear word.

“This isn’t really the issue at hand,” Zack pointed out, as Norm escorted them to the shuttle, his arm extended and a blaster on the end of it.

“I mean, is there _no end_ to that bastard’s depravity?!” Milo asked. “It’s not enough that he had to bomb entire planets, was it? No, he had to commit crimes against _history!”_

“Milo, I appreciate your enthusiasm for history,” Zack said patiently, “but this is _really_ not the time.”

*****

Milo was angry about the Caliginous Automaton being a fake, yes, but more than that, he was scared. He wasn’t scared of Norman, of course. The first Norman had been pretty frightening, but he was gone now. This second Norman would be much harder to dismantle.

No, it was what the imposter had _said_ that was worrying Milo. Mechanus had haunted Milo’s nightmares for years, and the two of them had only met on a handful of occasions.

Very few people could honestly say that they’d ever seen Mechanus’s real face, and Milo wasn’t one of them. Before the Mandalorian Wars started, Mechanus had kept it shrouded behind a hood, and once the Wars started, he kept it hidden behind a Mandalorian mask, whispered to have belonged to the first – but nowhere near the last – Mandalorian Mechanus had ever killed. On the battlefield, Mechanus wore a set of powered armor specifically designed for intimidation purposes, but he was no less intimidating in the armor that he perpetually wore off the battlefield. He was, in a word, terrifying of appearance.

But in the Force, he was something worse. There were barely words for it. If Milo had been forced to use any, he would have simply said that Mechanus was power. In retrospect, you could see the Jedi he would slay etched on his soul.

And he had thought Milo would be _useful_ to him. Could Milo still possibly _be_ useful to him, even in death? Mechanus was definitely dead – after the Battle of the Star Forge, his corpse was delivered to Coruscant and buried in a secret tomb checked daily to make sure he hadn’t somehow been resurrected. But if anyone could find a way to cheat death, it would be Mechanus.

Was Milo somehow following a path that Mechanus had laid out? Until now, Milo had thought that his choices, that his journey was his own. But as he looked out at the snowy slopes of Telos’s tundra, he wondered if he was just a pawn in someone else’s game.

“Don’t let him get into your head,” Melissa advised. Milo jumped in fright. “I wasn’t reading your thoughts, but I can feel your emotions sometimes through the bond, especially when I concentrate. You’re thinking that we’re still dancing to Mechanus’s tune, aren’t you?”

“Well, aren’t _you?”_ Milo wondered, but Melissa shook her head. “I set the tune of my own orchestra,” she said, her voice registering complete confidence. “I am in command of my own destiny. Nothing and no one decides my fate but me. Zack, crash the ship, would you?”

Huh? How had they gone from a full throttle defense of free will to _that?_ Did Melissa just not _understand_ the art of good conversational segues?

“Hang on a second!” Norman said, sounding somewhat panicked. “If you crash the ship, we’ll die! Being destroyed is not part of my agenda!”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” Milo said. “I’ve got a lot of experience in not dying.”

His lips twisted into a smile that was beautiful in its vicious intensity, Zack sent the ship hurtling down towards the small plateau that was their destination. At the same time, Milo released his hold on the Force that he had been using to temporarily waylay the effects of Murphy’s Law on the shuttle. Using the Force for that purpose wasn’t something that he did except in emergencies, because it felt _wrong._ It didn’t feel like the dark side. That didn’t feel wrong at all, which was precisely what made it so dangerous.

No, it felt wrong because it left Milo with a yawning void of emptiness, like he had lost a part of himself. He knew, instinctively, that Murphy’s Law was a part of who he was, and denying it was denying his true nature. No wonder his fears had come back to the forefront. They certainly hadn’t been backed by logic – if he had been some secret weapon for Mechanus, then he would have come back to Republic space and served him during the Jedi Civil War. Instead, Milo despised Mechanus for his evil doings and forcing –

“BRACE YOURSELVES!” Zack shouted as the shuttle smashed into the surface of the plateau. Everyone did, but it didn’t exactly do them too much good as they were thrown against the ground with stupendous force. Melissa and Milo were able to brace themselves with the Force, and Zack was saved from flying through the windshield by his seatbelt, but Sara’s head smashed face first into one of the shuttle’s walls, leaving her unconscious on impact.

Melissa and Milo gingerly carried Sara out of the shuttle, followed by Zack. The shuttle burst into flames and exploded behind them. “I think Norman might have been destroyed,” Milo said hopefully.

Naturally, it was that precise moment that the smoke cleared and Norman stepped through it, looking relatively unharmed. “You’re really starting to annoy me, Milo Murphy!” he said. “I don’t know why Mechanus thought so highly of you, but I suspect he may have been right!”

“He…thought highly of me?” Milo asked in horror.

“Oh, yes!” Norman said. “He told my predecessor once that your power could destroy the most dangerous enemy of all if necessary! Since you’re so dangerous, I should kill you, but I’m afraid my programming forbids me to do so!” He readied a missile and aimed it directly at Zack’s head. “But I can still kill your friends!”

“Why?!” Milo demanded. “ _Why_ kill them?”

“Why not?”

There was a blaster shot, and Milo closed his eyes. He couldn’t watch Zack die. Maybe that made him a coward, but if so, then a coward he was. Wait a second. Norman hadn’t had a blaster. He’d been readying a _missile,_ and he’d divested them of all of their weapons before they had gotten into the shuttle. So who had fired the blaster?

A moment later, he got his answer. Three women emerged from the snow blowing throughout the plateau, seemingly from nowhere. Of course, they hadn’t come from nowhere. Rather, that impression had been given by the pure white armor that they wore. They wore white masks to shield their face from the stinging snow, and wore white gloves. They all carried blaster pistols, pure white top of the line custom models, which they were firing at Norman, leaving hole after hole in his body. 

Norman fired his missile at them, but Melissa was ready this time. With a considerable amount of effort, she managed to redirect the missile. It wasn’t redirected by much, but it was enough to shoot past their heads and impact on a mountainside far away, creating an avalanche that Milo dearly hoped no one would get caught up in.

Norman readied another weapon, which looked like the unholy child of a missile launcher and a blaster, but then the arm that was wielding it was hit with half a dozen shots and blown away.

A beeping sound started reverberating throughout the plateau and Norman’s eyes started to flash red. “GET DOWN!” Zack screamed, just as Norman’s self-destruct mechanism activated, sending a jet of flame rising into the air and his parts scattering everywhere. It was a miracle that they didn’t hit anyone.

“Thank you for rescuing us,” Milo said. He instinctively grabbed one of the pieces and put it in his pocket. He needed to know what Norman had known about him, and if rebuilding Norm was the only way to get it, then that’s what he’d do.

One of the women stepped forward. It was Officer Lopez. “Milo Murphy, you will accompany us to meet the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, Elizabeth Milder,” she said. “She will pronounce judgment over you.”

Milo couldn’t help but let out a groan. He recognized the name. Any Jedi of his generation would, given that she had been in charge of overseeing the education of younglings before she was appointed to the Council. But Milder had always had a special hatred reserved for Milo. She thought him to be an attention seeking troublemaker because of Murphy’s Law, and any claims to the contrary he had ever made had fallen on deaf ears.

“And I suppose that if we don’t go with you, you’re going to kill us,” Zack said.

“It is against the teachings of the Order of the Watchful Eye to kill a defenseless opponent against the express command of the Grand Master,” one of the other women said. “However, the weather does not have such compunctions. Refuse to accompany us, and we will leave you here to freeze to death.”

“Like hell you will,” Zack said, getting into a Teräskäsi stance. 

Milo looked Lopez in the face. He trusted her. He didn’t know why, but he did. “My sister needs medical attention. If you can give it to her, I and my friends will go with you of our own free will.”

Lopez looked over at the woman who had not yet spoken, who nodded. “Agreed. She will come to no harm under our care. You will have to be handcuffed. Please do not resist.”

They didn’t resist, even though Zack looked like he very, very much wanted to. Hopefully, Zack had come to the same conclusion that Milo did: that they were outclassed, outgunned, and out of tricks. They had nowhere to run that they could get to before they froze to death, their shuttle was hopelessly in ruins, and their only chance at salvation lay in the hands of a woman who had once referred to Milo as the “thrice-accursed avatar of malice, hatred, and darkness.”

All in all, this was probably the 38th most deadly situation he had ever been in. But, then again, he had survived all 37 of the deadlier ones. If he could survive being thrown into a sarlacc, he could survive this. Probably.

*****

Zack had received a great deal of training back during his time in the Jedi Civil War. He had been trained to resist practically all forms of interrogation. And there were few better than he was. It was child’s play to give _just_ enough answers to make the Order of the Watchful Eye think that their methods were working, while making it look like he was holding back enough to justify them continuing. He knew that once they stopped, the odds were good that he’d be killed.

The Watchful appeared to be obsessed with ferreting out hidden dark side corruption, and, more specifically, with Milo Murphy’s activities. So he had sold them what they wanted to buy, weaving an impressively detailed story of Milo Murphy, secret Sith Lord, and his evil plots to corrupt the Republic and bring the galaxy into a new era of depravity and wickedness. It was all Zack could do to not laugh out loud.

Finally, after yet another grueling torture session when he had informed them of Milo’s malevolent schemes to escalate the Kanz Disorders, Zack was finally tossed into a forcecage in a room containing Melissa…who was looking completely unharmed. What the heck?

“Why haven’t they tortured _you_ yet?” Zack asked irritably.

“Oh, I’ve been brainwashing them into thinking that I’m not important,” Melissa said as casually as if she was discussing the weather. “It’s a very effective tactic, especially on people who are so caught up in their preconceived notions that they can’t see the forest for the trees.”

She started humming a tune, looking like she hadn’t a care in the world. It wasn’t…oh, Force, it _was._ Not _that_ song. The last thing he needed was Melissa humming that song with Milo around. Once that secret came out, everything else would come with it, Zack just _knew it._

Melissa suddenly smiled and looked Zack in the face, looking somewhat surprised. “I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection before. It’s you. You’re Zack of the Lumberzacks.”

“No,” Zack lied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You _are!”_ Melissa said, sounding excited. “Wow! I can’t believe that I’m actually traveling with the lead singer of the Lumberzacks! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Her face suddenly turned contemplative. “Why _didn’t_ you tell us earlier? You’d think that it’d be something you’d brag about. It’d certainly impress Milo. Unless…there’s some _other_ secret connected to it.”

Her hand was suddenly extended and Zack’s vision abruptly turned dark. He was no longer in the holding cells, but in a labyrinth made of pure darkness, a labyrinth that twisted and turned, reshaping itself constantly with the Force, undulating with horrible intensity. He knew that it was an illusion, but every movement caused him pain, and even _thinking_ hurt.

Melissa stood before him, transformed. She was no longer her mortal self. The mental construct of her was terrible in its beauty, an angel of darkness hovering in the air with the aid of dark grey wings. The left side of her face was pale and rotting, her eyes having yellow irises with fiery red rims around them. That side of her hair was pure white. The right side of her face looked exactly like it did now, with her red hair, her blue eyes which seemed to shine even brighter than in real life. If anything, that side of her scared Zack _more._

“WHO _ARE_ YOU?!” Zack shouted.

Melissa tilted her head, looking as though she found the question amusing. “You play sabacc, don’t you? You could say that I’m the Queen of Air and Darkness.” 

Sabacc was not just a card game. It was also used for cartomantic purposes, divination through the drawing of cards, by believers in occult practices (mostly hucksters in Zack’s experience) to gain knowledge of the future. One of those cards, the Queen of Air and Darkness, represented death. But often that death could be a metaphorical one, denoting a change in one’s position, way of thinking, or interpretation of one’s own inner nature. It was certainly an interesting name for Melissa to choose for herself.

“But who I am is not the question,” Melissa went on, sounding annoyed. She had definitely let slip more than she had wanted to. “The far more important question is who are _you,_ Zack Underwood?”

Melissa surged forward, her hands sparkling with grey colored light, and Zack could _feel_ her rooting through his mind. There were a _lot_ of secrets hidden there. Zack was a very private person. But he would _not_ let her access to _those_ secrets, not if she was planning to expose them to Milo. In time, Zack would tell him everything, but he _had_ to wait for the right moment. If he didn’t…he’d lose Milo.

And so he fought. One of the methods of interrogation that he had been trained against was probes into one’s mind using the Force. Some of Mechanus’s most powerful Dark Jedi had taught him those skills, and Melissa, for all her cunning and alarming skill at mental manipulation, wasn’t even in the same league as those towering edifices of pure evil.

He focused on one mental focal point, and that was his love for Milo. He blocked out absolutely everything else. None of it was real, not Melissa’s hellish appearance, not the labyrinth, not the disquieting desire that he kept having to blurt every secret he had out loud. It did not originate from his mind. He was Zack Underwood, he was in a forcecage in the headquarters of the Order of the Watchful Eye, and he loved Milo Murphy. Any evidence to the contrary could be safely ignored.

He was in his own mind and he was the master of his own destiny, and he controlled his surroundings, not Melissa. With the snap of his fingers, he was back on Alderaan in his parents’ house. He hadn’t been there since he was a teenager. His parents had been minor nobility, not absurdly wealthy, but certainly not lacking for money either. They hadn’t just sat around and let their wealth accumulate, though. Noblesse oblige hadn’t just been a fancy expression for them; it had been the bedrock upon which they lived their lives.

It was a commitment to other people that led them to the Outer Rim to help build hospitals in impoverished communities. The Mandalorians hadn’t been quite so charitable. They had burned one of those hospitals down with Zack’s parents inside of it. Zack had gone into the Republic military the moment he turned of age to avenge their deaths, unequivocally the worst mistake of his life.

They would have been utterly ashamed of the man he had become. But perhaps, with Milo’s help, he would be able to become someone his parents could have been proud of again.

His reverie was interrupted by the sound of applause. It had come from Melissa, who was sitting in the chair that his grandmother had often sat in, knitting away and telling stories of the Killiks who had ruled Alderaan before humans arrived. Zack clenched his fists, the mere sight of Melissa in such a sacred space getting his blood boiling.

“That was _exceedingly_ impressive, especially for a man who has never even touched the Force before,” Melissa said, sounding like she was quite sincere in her flattery. “I even suspect you must have some untouched talent to resist me to _this_ level. Well done. I _could_ break through this wall, of course.”

She clapped her hands and then they were back in reality, and the illusory realm completely dispelled. “It would take time and _considerable_ effort – again, I am _seriously_ impressed – but I could do it if I needed to.” She smirks. “But you see…I _don’t_ need to break through your walls, Zack. The fact that you _have_ them is all I need to know.”

“Shit,” Zack said under his breath. Melissa was right. The only two places that he could ever have learned such techniques were under the tutelage of Republic or Imperial Intelligence, and he would _never_ have struggled so hard if he had been trained by the Republic. He wouldn’t have had any reason to. Melissa may not have known all the gory details, but the fact that she knew that there _were_ any was enough. “This is where you blackmail me, right?”

Melissa spread her arms out, looking like the picture of understanding and compassion. “All I want, Zack, is for us to establish a…truce, if you would. You stay out of my business, I stay out of yours. I think that’s more than fair. Right now, we’re at an impasse mentally, and our arrangement should reflect that.”

It sounded reasonable enough, which was likely a sure sign that he was missing some very, very pertinent details somewhere. But what the heck. It’s not as if he’d be magically binding himself or anything by saying yes. “All right, but under one condition: If you _ever_ hurt Milo, I will come after you with everything I’ve got.”

“If I ever hurt Milo,” Melissa said quietly, “then I not only authorize you to beat me to a bloody pulp, I _demand_ that you do it.” She was silent for a few moments. “Why don’t you get some rest? We’ve got a lot ahead of us.”

Zack wasn’t sure how he could get a wink of sleep after the tortures he had been through, let alone Melissa’s probe into his mind, but then Melissa snapped her fingers and everything went black.

*****

This is how it feels to be Milo Murphy right now:

There are shackles at your wrists and ankles, as you are dragged into the room that looks bizarrely both like and unlike the Council Chamber on Coruscant, but you don’t care about that. There are blaster rifles that make the ones that the Ryyk Company was using look like child’s toys pointing at your head, but you don’t care about that either.

In fact, you’re finding it very difficult to care about anything right now. Part of it is the drugs that are still coursing through your system, dulling your connection to the Force, but you know that there is more to it than that. It’s almost as if you are outside your body somehow, watching events happen to you rather than participating in them. It’s a feeling that you felt quite a bit when you were younger, freshly exiled from the Order. It’s not a feeling that you’ve felt in some time.

And it is _very_ much a feeling that you never wanted to feel again, especially not with your fate in the hands of a woman who hates you with all the burning passion of a thousand suns and is coming your way and is…smiling?

Huh?

“Milo Murphy,” Elizabeth Milder says, her voice warm and caring. It snaps you back into reality for the most part. You’ve never heard her sound anything more favorably disposed to you than icily cordial, and even then only a few times when there were outsiders present. “It’s been such a long time, but you’ve finally returned to the fold. Welcome back to the Jedi Order.”

You cannot have possibly heard her right. “You’re…bringing me _back_ into the Order?” The idea is just incomprehensible. Milder argued the most fervently in favor of your exile. She hated you from the start. Jedi, it has been often said, do not hate, but no one who spent more than a minute in Milder’s company would ever believe that old axiom.

“I most certainly am,” she says, her smile one of infinite tenderness and compassion. “Milo Murphy, by the power invested in me by the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic, as Grand Master of the Jedi Order, I hereby return to your rank of Jedi Initiate.”

A tear runs down your face. You were _not_ expecting this, and it warms your heart. Throughout your childhood, it was always a secret dream of yours to gain Milder’s approval _somehow._ You tried scheme after scheme, but they always ended in spectacular failure, courtesy of Murphy’s Law. Eventually, you stopped trying. But perhaps the efforts had more success than you thought they would.

“Why?” you say eventually.

“Oh, the answer to that is quite simple, actually,” Milder says, her voice completely calm and polite, with nothing but serene detachment in it. “You see, as a member of the Jedi Order, you are now under my authority. And as such, you are subject to the High Council’s punishments. We have complete legal authority to do whatever we wish. And since I am the only current member of the High Council, I hereby sentence you to death.”

Oh. Well. That makes more sense than Milder having a change of heart, you think, somewhat numbly. You close your eyes. You’re one person, and you’re facing a Jedi Master and two very angry looking, very heavily armed women. Your lightsaber is gone, lost to the mists of time, even if you wanted to challenge Milder. What good would fighting do you?

But an instant later, you realize that you are wrong. Not about the efficacy of fighting or lack thereof. You are wrong about your lightsaber being gone. It’s not gone at all.

It’s in Milder’s right hand, and it is pointed directly at your throat. For a moment, you think you may be hallucinating. It’s been nine years since you’ve last seen it. Surely this is just your brain malfunctioning and giving you a taste of something familiar in your last moments of existence. But it is not. This is _your_ lightsaber. It belongs to _you._

And finally, you find yourself possessed of an emotion other than dull acceptance. You find yourself feeling…not necessarily _anger,_ but something slightly purer than that. Righteous fury, perhaps, is the best word for it. There were taboos amongst the Jedi, and one was that you never wielded another person’s lightsaber when you didn’t need to. Of course, there would _always_ be times when you had no choice, and that was okay. It was fine in a life or death situation, or if the other Jedi had given you permission.

But to just _take_ another Jedi’s lightsaber and threaten to _kill_ that Jedi with it? It was just beyond the pale. “That is _my_ lightsaber,” you tell Milder, surprised at how _intense_ your voice sounds. “You do not have the right to wield it. Shoot me if you want. Slice my head off with your _own_ lightsaber. But I will bring this whole building down upon your head if you use mine.”

Milder chuckles, a sound disquieting for its total lack of humor. “All those years I tried to draw your true self out, and it turned out that all I needed to do was use your own saber against you. I’m…disappointed, almost. But you are wrong. It is not your lightsaber. It is the property of the Jedi Order, and right now, I _am_ the Jedi Order. You gave it up.”

“Please,” you say, your voice breaking with the intensity you feel. “I am _begging_ you. Don’t kill me with my own lightsaber. Don’t do it! Please!”

Milder looks confused for a second. She did not expect you to beg. But whatever sliver of doubt she may have been showing on her face vanishes from her expression seconds later as if it was never there. “Silence. Milo Murphy, you are charged with destroying Peragus and murdering the crew of the _Harbinger._ If you apologize and express remorse for your crimes, I may consider executing you with my own lightsaber instead.”

“I didn’t do it!” you say immediately. Perhaps it was not the smartest move you have ever made, but on the other hand, do you have another one to make? You will not confess to crimes you did not commit. The idea that you should doesn’t even occur to you. “It was the Pistachions! They’re led by a Sith Lord named Darth Pistachion.”

Milder looks upon you with an expression that encompasses every ounce of the vicious fury that she always felt towards you. “You deny your crimes. Of course you do. You never took responsibility for your sins. That was always your most disgusting aspect. You didn’t do it at your trial either. Perhaps you need a reminder of that day. This is a technique I learned from the only Aing-Tii to have ever joined the Jedi.”

She steps towards you and presses her hand against your head, and then you are somewhere else. Not just somewhere else. You are _somewhen_ else. You are back in the worst moment of your life, and you know in the core of your being that you aren’t back in your memories. The scene before you is as sharp as it was when you were there. Because you _are_ there. You have traveled back in time to the second worst moment of your life, and to make matters worse, you cannot do anything to change it. No one sees you, no one hears you, and no one can feel you in the Force. It is a technique called flow walking, you will learn later, a technique that allows its users to travel back or forward in time, but never _ever_ change it, any more than you could change the course of a river by walking back and forth in it.

You are back in your trial, and you can do nothing but watch it play out, watched by Milder, who looks upon you with an almost greedy intensity.

Not every Jedi on the Council chose to participate in your trial. You did not know why then and you do not know why now. Grand Master Flynn, Phineas’ mother, for example, was absent. Would they have voted to keep you in the Order? You do not know, and it does not matter. The only five people whose opinion mattered were the ones who showed up.

Nolan Mitchell, noted for his mastery of telekinesis and fiery, take-no-prisoners approach to his time on the Council. He would decidedly have voted yes to exiling you. He did not hate you for existing like Milder does, but he hated the Crusaders, so the end result was the same. 

Patrick Brick, whose specialty was precognition and was noted for his maverick approach to many issues on the Council. You do not know if the vote to exile you was unanimous, but if it was not, you suspect that he voted no.

Christine Murawski, who favored a scientific approach to understanding the Force and was said to use woodworking as a meditation tool. At least, one assumes that she did, given all the time she spent on it. You’re not sure which way she voted. It could have gone either way.

Francis Monogram, the stern, no-nonsense figure who, during the days of the Great Sith War, survived a one on one battle with no less than Exar Kun himself. Had the Jedi chosen to go to war with the Mandalorians, perhaps he, not Mechanus, would have been the one to deliver the final blow. But he did not. He would have voted yes too.

And, of course, Milder herself, who would have voted yes to chopping off Milo’s head if it had been on the table back then.

You remember what you were feeling then, and you’re feeling it again. An echo, but it feels _so real._ You feel the fear pulsating within your body as if it’s a living thing. You knew that your time in the Jedi Order was coming to a close, and it terrified you, because you had never known anything _but_ being a Jedi. Even as a Crusader, you were still a Jedi of a sort. Who were you if you weren’t a Jedi? You know the answer to that now, but you didn’t then, and you couldn’t envision it ever being otherwise.

“Do you know why we have called you here?” Murawski asked, her voice softer than you remember. She must have voted yes.

You will your younger self not to answer her, to just _leave_ and deny them what you know is coming. You even shout out and plead to him, but it is useless. What happened, happened. What you are watching is little more than a recording, and your younger self says the words that you still replay in your dreams on a regular basis.

“No,” you said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I just did what I was told.”

“Deciding to activate the Mass Shadow Generator, even if you had orders to do so, was a war crime,” Mitchell said, his voice implacable. “You are a Jedi. You should have known better. You killed hundreds of thousands of sentient beings.”

 _NO!_ you scream, but only in your head. They were twisting his words! Milo hadn’t been _ordered_ to activate the Mass Shadow Generator. He had been ordered to follow the teachings of the Jedi, to obey his master, to do what was right, to defend innocents. He had done everything he had been instructed to do, and it meant _nothing._

“It wasn’t me,” you said. You remember the panic you felt. You were not a mass murderer. You were _not._ It wasn’t possible. “It was an accident. It was Murphy’s Law.”

“Milo,” Monogram said, his voice stern but kind, the same tone he’d use while speaking to a lunatic, “there is no Murphy’s Law. We’ve humored this delusion of yours for long enough, but it is time for you to face facts. The Force does not _work_ that way. It doesn’t just _shift_ probability around someone.”

Brick smiled at you, looking like he understood exactly what was going on in your head, unaware that he could not have been more wrong. “Milo, I understand how you feel. War is a horror the likes of which we, as Jedi, were simply never meant to face. It is not something we are designed for. It can…unbalance us in fundamental ways. This… _belief_ you have developed that you accidentally activated the Mass Shadow Generator may serve you well now, but in time, it will break, and you will be the worse for it. I would not want to be in your shoes when it does.”

Milder – the past version of her – looked contemptuously in Brick’s direction. “You all assume that he has been driven mad, but you are wrong. He is no victim, and this so-called Murphy’s Law is actually his conscious use of the dark side to attack the Jedi, culminating in a pathetic justification for an unthinkable atrocity.”

None of the Jedi looked like they believed her. You did not notice that then. You were too consumed with your own fear, your own horrible dread that the worst was yet to come, that once you were gone from the Order, you would _never_ be whole again.

“Please don’t do this,” you beg, and the same words come out of your younger self’s mouth. You cannot help yourself. It is as if your lips are compelled somehow to repeat the monologue. “I don’t know why you all hate me so much! I haven’t done anything wrong! I’m a Jedi, the same as you are! Please. I don’t deserve this.”

“You are right, Milo,” Past Milder says, much to everyone’s brief surprise. “You do not deserve this. You deserve far worse. But you will not, alas, be getting it. Perhaps one day. For now, it is the decision of the Jedi Council that you are exiled from the Order. Surrender your lightsaber and your Padawan braid.”

You ignited your lightsaber and sliced off your Padawan braid yourself before anyone else could do it for you, and then you dumped both of them in front of the stele in the center of the chamber. “Go to hell, all of you!” you screamed, fury suddenly coalescing within you.

And then every single window in the chamber exploded at once. The thousands of pieces of glass floated in the air, whirring around the room like they were caught up in a tornado. An outsider would say that it was a miracle that no one was harmed. You know differently. It was _your_ will that directed the glass for once, and though you hated those people with every ounce of your being for taking away the only life that you had ever known, you couldn’t bear to hurt them.

They were your family, after all.

The glass fell to the ground, harmlessly. “I could have killed you,” you told them. “If I was the monster you thought I was, you’d all be dead. But I’m telling the _truth._ You’ll all see it one day. I’m not a killer. The Mass Shadow Generator’s activation was an accident. And despite your words, I am still a Jedi.”

You turn around, and –

“STOP IT!” you suddenly scream, and then you are back in the present day. Milder looks as surprised as you are to have been drawn back to the realm of reality. “How…?” she whispers under her breath.

“I don’t know why you hate me so much, and I don’t care either,” you say. “You kidnapped my friend Baljeet Tjinder, and you stole our ship. Release him, free us, give us back our property, and I swear, you will never have to see me again.”

Milder throws back her head and laughs. “You must be a fool indeed to think I am tricked by your paltry deceptions. You will be executed at sunrise tomorrow with your lightsaber. Oh, and one more thing. Your so-called friend, the droid? He was dismantled and his pieces incinerated. Sister Retina made sure of it.”

You throw yourself at her, but then the Watchful shoot you with stun bolts and everything goes black.

*****

Why is it, Zack wondered, that everywhere he went, he ended up in a cell? Sure, he had committed crimes, but the only crimes he’d been accused of during his not one, not two, but _three_ recent incarcerations were ones that he _hadn’t_ committed. Zack still wasn’t sold on the idea of this all-powerful Force controlling the destiny of the galaxy. Oh, yes, the Force _existed,_ but that wasn’t the same thing as saying it had a will. But if it had a will, then it had a _hell_ of a lot to answer for.

The guards entered the room with an unconscious Milo in tow and dumped him in a forcecage, then left without saying another word. Melissa suddenly smirked. “What’s got _you_ so cheerful?” he wondered.

“Because they just left _Milo_ inside a complex mechanical apparatus,” Melissa explained. “Remember what happened to our forcecages on Citadel Station? These things’ll go down soon enough.”

Of course she just _had_ to say that out loud, because they didn’t go down at all. The electricity cut out periodically and what looked like a Loth-cat rushed through the room at one point, but the forcecages remained stubbornly functional. Once Milo regained consciousness, he informed them that they were all going to be executed at dawn, which didn’t exactly improve Zack’s move any.

“It’s possible that maybe she just wants to execute _me_ ,” Milo pointed out. “They might let you go if I don’t resist! Maybe?”

“Executing you is a very, _very_ bad thing, Milo!” Zack said. “I think it should be avoided at all costs! Melissa, please tell me that you can get us out of this?”

“Hey, man, I’m a brilliant journalist, a fashionista extraordinaire, and not a half-bad golfer, but I’m not a miracle worker,” she pointed out. “I’m just as screwed as you are.”

The next few hours went by with agonizing slowness. Milo tried to make conversation, to talk about the various wonders of the galaxy he had seen, but all that served to do was remind Zack that he didn’t have a future in which to see them. Eventually, his conversational attempts sputtered into mostly awkward silences.

Less than thirty minutes before dawn, Milo said, “I love –”

“I feel the same way, Milo,” Zack said quickly, “but if we do get out of this, I don’t want our first time saying it to have been _here._ ”

Milo was silent for a long while, looking like he was struggling with something. “You know a lot of Teräs Käsi moves, right? And some fatal ones?”

“Yeah, but they’re not exactly all that effective against people with _blasters.”_

Milo shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I _can’t_ be executed with my own lightsaber, Zack. I just _can’t._ Use them on me. If I’m to be killed, I’d rather you do it.”

Zack nodded his head, because he knew that if he had spoken, Milo would know that he was lying. There was nothing that could ever make him harm Milo, not even Milo himself. Milo nodded back. He knew that Zack was lying, but in their last moments, he wanted to at least have the comfort in pretending.

Ten minutes before their scheduled time of executions, the door opened and two of the Watchful entered the room. Zack recognized one of them as the false Officer Lopez, or, as she called herself, Sister Retina, and the other as the torture-happy Sister Fovea. “You have all been sentenced to death, Milo Murphy for his crimes against Peragus, and the rest of you for being complicit,” Fovea said, her voice harder than stone.

“What about my sister?” Milo asked, his voice frantic. “I hadn’t had any contact with her for five years before Peragus! You can’t kill her!”

“Miss Murphy succumbed to her wounds,” Retina said, her voice flat. “I’m very sorry.”

“LIKE HELL YOU ARE!” Milo shouted, his face twisted with anger, and cracks appeared in the walls. Retina shot him with a stun bolt, and then two more in quick succession, and he went limp. She dragged him out of the room.

Zack didn’t resist as the two Watchful led him and Melissa out at blasterpoint and through the labyrinthine halls of the facility. What would have been the point? He would resist at the execution, though. The last thing he wanted to do was get executed with _Milo’s lightsaber._ It was just unacceptable. And if he could get them to kill Milo another way too, then, yes, he’d do it.

Zack risked a glance over at Melissa and found that she was…smiling? What the kriff? “How in the _galaxy_ could you be _smiling_ at a moment like this?”

“Because I know something you don’t know,” Melissa said. “And you’ll learn it right…” Fovea stopped in her tracks and eyed her surroundings suspiciously. “…now.”

“Why are we going this way?” Fovea demanded from Retina. “This isn’t the right way to the execution chamber!”

The sound of a blaster being fired reverberated throughout the room as two bolts sliced through Fovea’s heart and out the other side, leaving her dead before she hit the ground. Retina followed it off with a shot between the eyes. It was a move known as the Jakku Drill, and it was very popular among ex-military and ex-law enforcement types.

“Who are you?” Melissa wondered.

“Her name is Amanda Lopez,” a very familiar voice said, and Zack turned to see Baljeet walking in the room from a door on the other side, “and she’s here to rescue you.”

*****

This is Amanda Lopez:

Not many people can be described in a single word, and, indeed, as this section of the story will prove, Amanda Lopez is not one of those people. But if I _absolutely had_ to describe her in a single word, it would be orderly. Amanda believes in the necessity of maintaining order, not as one would believe in an ideal, but as one believes in air. It is so blatantly obvious that anyone denying it is not only out of their mind, but never had a mind to begin with.

Amanda has dedicated her life to order and she practices what she preaches. Her entire life has been led according to regimented schedules, ironclad rules that she has never, _ever_ broken. The idea that she _can_ break them is just absolutely inconceivable to her. It’s not that she doesn’t believe in fun, she just doesn’t see how anything that doesn’t involve maintaining order, either in herself or in society, can _be_ fun.

In many ways, it has worked for her, and we are not here to judge her on the ways in which it has not, for those judgments are subjective. They are also not relevant. What _is_ relevant is she is among the most successful police officers Eriadu had ever created. She has brought down drug lords, serial killers, jewel thieves, and even a conspiracy to assassinate a group of senators.

Amanda’s beliefs in the necessity of order don’t just apply to her own life. She has dedicated her life to making sure that order is instilled upon her contemporaries as well. As one of the most famous Caamasi philosophers once said, “Law is order, and good law is good order.”

Of course, Amanda was certainly not blind to the flaws in the Eriaduan justice system, and, indeed, in order to get those flaws erased, she was _far_ more politically active than her superiors were strictly comfortable with. That was her right as a citizen. But as a police officer, even a rookie one, it was her duty to enforce said laws, and she always accomplished that duty.

Eventually, though, she came to the realization that her superiors did not feel the same way. Laws that were meant to protect were being used to hurt and rend, selectively applied to minority groups to give them a death of a thousand cuts, to send the unspoken message that _they didn’t belong._ The more she tried to work through the system to stop these abuses of power, the more the system turned against her. She was one woman, and while good law was good order, bad law was bad order.

And the last thing she could _ever_ have stood for was a noble cause like order being perverted in such a manner.

She could have pressed the system further, and there were days when she wished she had. But most of the time, she maintained that she made the right choice when she left her position and joined the Judicial Department of the Galactic Republic instead.

She had certainly done it at the right time. The Jedi Civil War had just started, and the war meant that criminals thought that they had the ability now to operate with total impunity. To make matters worse, they were more or less right too. Amanda was proud of the work she was doing, but sometimes, she felt like she was fighting a hopeless battle. Who cared about combating murderers when Darth Mechanus was bombing planets with abandon?

Elizabeth Milder, as it turned out, cared. She cared immensely, enough to have Amanda assigned as a liaison to the Jedi Order to help them stamp out crime by dark side users. While the Sith got all the press coverage, minor dark side users, Dark Jedi as they were called, were a persistent problem to the galaxy. A criminal with superpowers could commit far more loathsome crimes than an ordinary one, and even someone with a touch of knowledge of how to use the dark side was a far greater threat than a normal criminal could ever be.

As the war raged on, Amanda experienced firsthand Milder’s compassion, wisdom, and empathy. She cared about the ordinary person, and valued justice and order just as she did. More than that, she had vision. She saw a pattern in galactic history that most did not. While, of course, war was not the exclusive domain of the Sith, they wielded it in a more devastating fashion than most could ever be capable of.

And though most of her contemporaries refused to admit it, almost every Sith Lord of note over the last several centuries had once been a Jedi. They had _fallen_ to the dark side, not been born to it. If they could be identified once they had fallen, they could be slain before they could do any damage.

Amanda had to admit that the idea of executing Jedi just for crimes they _might_ commit did not appeal to her one iota. On the other hand, the rules _did_ appear different for Jedi, given that they had the dark side to worry about. Amanda was fuzzy on metaphysical matters, but she did concede that a Sith Lord was an extraordinarily dangerous threat, one that simply could _not_ be taken and held alive.

In retrospect, she should have listened to her misgivings. And perhaps had the war ended more successfully, that’s all they would have needed to stay. Milder’s philosophies never would have been adopted by the Council as a whole after all; it was far too close to the Jedi Covenant, a chapter of the Order’s history everyone dearly wanted to forget.

But the war ended quite unsuccessfully indeed. Yes, to an outside observer the Republic stood, it won, but it was broken and fractured in ways that were nigh impossible to recover from. And the Jedi Order was even worse off. It just…fizzled out. Like it had never been there to begin with. Knights, Padawans, and masters left without giving even a reason for their departure. They didn’t need to. They were no longer serving the Republic because soon there wouldn’t be a Republic _to_ serve.

Milder would not give up on the Republic. She refused to. She made a new headquarters for the Jedi, scoured the galaxy in search of suitable students, and founded the Order of the Watchful Eye to monitor the Jedi for the slightest sign of dark side corruption. Amanda followed her orders unquestionably for years. She never showed the slightest sign of disloyalty.

But eventually, she had to face what, to her, was an undeniable truth: Milder had lost her marbles. She spent more and more time in her meditation chambers, her mood became increasingly erratic, and her punishments became more and more severe.

She had, put it simply, fallen to the dark side without noticing. Amanda knew it because she had been trained to identity signs of the dark side influencing a person by Milder herself, and Milder was a textbook case. She would never declare herself the next Sith Lord, but if her teachings were allowed to spread, she would become something worse: a dark cancer eating away at the heart of the Republic.

So when a representative of the chancellor showed up at the facility and Milder had ordered him to be _dismantled,_ Amanda took action. For the first time she could remember, she disobeyed a direct order and hid Baljeet instead of disassembling him. When Milo, Zack, Sara, and that woman whose name escaped her arrived at the facility, she had assumed that Milder would kick them out, which would be bad enough. But when she ordered them all to be _executed,_ she knew that things had gone _way_ too far. She had faked Sara’s death and staged a rescue.

Amanda didn’t have to do it. Many people who professed to follow the path of order wouldn’t have. But while beliefs were all well and good, _people_ were more important.

And that is why I cannot use one word to describe Amanda Lopez. Or, perhaps, more accurately, why I cannot simply use the word orderly to describe her. It does not fully explain her. She is orderly, but she is also just. In her mind, without securing the common good for the people is just another kind of chaos. Injustice, not disorder, was the greatest enemy of all. 

And she will be damned if she lets an injustice like this extrajudicial, ridiculous execution happen on her watch. It is not just intolerable to her. It is inconceivable.

*****

“I’m so glad you’re all right!” Milo said, and ran up to his friend. The next thing he knew, he was giving him a tight hug that, had he given it to an organic, probably would have hurt. Milo was a deceptively strong individual. His backpack full of adventuring gear weighed a ton, especially since Murphy’s Law meant that he absolutely had to have multiple backups of everything, and he had built up his muscles carrying it practically everywhere he went until he had been forced to leave it aboard the _Provident._

“I owe that to Miss Lopez here,” Baljeet said with a respectful nod at their rescuer, who just shrugged.

“It was the right thing to do, that’s all,” she said. “And please call me Amanda. Look, we don’t have time to stand around chatting. Milder is going to find out that I’ve rescued you soon enough, and then my sisters – my _former_ sisters – will come after us all. And Milder herself. She may be not be the most stable individual right now, but I _assure_ you that her madness has not robbed her of her skill with a blade."

Milo looked over at Zack. “You trust her?”

“I don’t trust _anyone_ , man,” Zack said. “You know that. Except you, of course. But I think the question we need to answer ourselves isn’t do we trust her, it’s do we have another choice? And the answer to that question is a hard no.”

“We need to recover my sister’s body,” Milo said.

Amanda shook her head. “She’s alive; I faked her death. She’s aboard the _Hawk_ already.”

Milo’s mouth dropped open in shock, but then he closed it, because in retrospect, he should have _known_ that Sara was still alive. If she had died, he would have felt it through the Force, and he should have known that. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Thank you for saving her. For rescuing us. I know it couldn’t have been easy to turn against your friends.”

Amanda sighed. “It _shouldn’t_ have been easy. But it was. And that’s what makes it all so sad.”

Despite Amanda’s warnings that they were in for a difficult time of things, their path to the _Hawk_ was completely free of obstacles. Suspiciously free. Milo wasn’t paranoid like Zack, but that’s not to say that he was naïve either. Their escape was turning out to be quite, quite easy.

But then again, what motive could Amanda have for luring them into a trap or orchestrating their escape to gain their trust? They were _already_ in her clutches. It’s not as if they had, for example, a hidden rebel base to lead the Watchful to. They barely knew what they were even _doing._ They didn’t have anything to _hide._ He was an open book. He and his friends weren’t hiding any secrets. The idea was ridiculous.

Thankfully, for all her internal defenses, Milder didn’t have any external defenses set up for her fortress, so the _Ebon Hawk_ was able to escape without any problems. As they went into hyperspace, Milo couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. They had escaped Milder’s clutches, and now they could face the Pistachions head on, with both Sara and Amanda there to help.

“It’s off to Coruscant, right?” Zack asked once he had put the ship into autopilot.

Baljeet shook his head. “Things have gotten a bit…complicated. I’ll let the chancellor explain. Fortunately, I always carry a backup datapad, just in case I need to contact him and I’ve lost my primary one.” He plugged the datapad into the _Ebon_ _Hawk’s_ communication systems and waited.

And waited. And waited.

Finally, the better part of an hour later, the green-haired, impeccably elegant face of Ferb Fletcher appeared as a hologram in front of them. The chancellor nodded politely at Milo, who bowed respectfully. “Your Excellency, it’s an honor to meet you,” Milo said.

_“The honor is all mine, Mr. Murphy. Our meeting has been long – and, I hope, necessarily – delayed. Perhaps I can ask why?”_

“Well, that’s Murphy’s Law for you,” Milo said. “It never turns out the way you expected.”

Milo thought that he saw Fletcher crack a smile for the barest fraction of a second, and then it was gone as suddenly as it appeared. _“Indeed. Baljeet, your report, if you please.”_

Baljeet explained what had happened to them in Peragus while Zack, Milo, and Sara filled in the blanks about what had occurred on Citadel Station and at Milder’s Academy. Milo didn’t realize until much later that Melissa had slipped away shortly before Fletcher’s hologram appeared, but he didn’t give it much thought when he did. She was probably in the refresher or something.

Fletcher had listened to the report with the stoicism that he was galaxy-famous for, only registering disgust when he heard about Milder planning to execute them. _“Thank you for going above and beyond in the service of the Republic, all of you. Unfortunately, this matter presents further problems. The only way I will gain support for starting yet another war is by having the Jedi involved. And Elizabeth Milder, given her mental instability,_ cannot _be allowed to lay claim to the title of Jedi Grand Master. A Jedi Council must be assembled and expel her from the Order.”_

Zack groaned. “I really, _really_ hope this isn’t going where I think it is.”

 _“Our intelligence services,”_ Fletcher continued as if he hadn’t heard Zack’s comment, _“have identified four members of the Jedi Council that they believe to still be alive.”_ The images of those four Jedi masters displaced Fletcher’s image, one after the other.

Murawski, last seen on Korriban. Mitchell, last seen on Nar Shaddaa. Brick, last seen on Onderon. Monogram, last seen on Dantooine. The Jedi Masters who had sentenced him to exile. If that was a coincidence, Milo would eat his shoes.

 _“You will be amply compensated for locating them, of course,”_ Fletcher said. “ _My office has access to discretionary funds. You also now all have full status as members of the Diplomatic Corps, and, with it, diplomatic immunity. Once you have found them, you will convince them to gather in a conclave on Dantooine. Are there any objections?”_

“Milo?” Zack asked. Milo could tell that Zack had been sold the moment Fletcher had mentioned ample compensation, but he appreciated that Zack was still asking for his okay. But as much as some part of Milo did _want_ to run and just let the galaxy take care of itself, he knew that he couldn’t do that, any more than he could stop breathing or loving Zack.

He shook his head. There were no objections from anyone else either. _“Excellent,”_ Fletcher said. _“May the Force be with you all.”_

There was silence in the room at first, which was finally broken by Zack. “So where to first?”

*****

Elizabeth Milder watched the _Ebon Hawk_ go into the atmosphere with a smile on her face. She had been sensing Amanda’s loyalty waver for months, and while her instincts told her that she should be severely punished for it, the Force told her that Amanda’s disloyalty would serve a greater purpose. She listened to the Force. She always had, for the Force was always right.

And sure enough, Amanda had turned against her. To her credit, it had taken quite a bit to push her over the edge. She had had to play the deranged maniac and threaten to execute not just Murphy, who manifestly deserved death, but also the smuggler and Murphy’s sister, the former of which deserved imprisonment and the latter of whom was completely innocent. She never would have actually killed them, and if Amanda had been loyal, she would have known that.

Instead, Amanda broke them out of jail and helped them “escape,” just as planned. If she had stopped to think for a moment, to trust in the Force instead of going _against_ the natural order of things, she would have known that her escape was too easy. But she had not.

With a great deal of time and advanced interrogation techniques, Milder could have extracted all the knowledge of Milo’s sinister plots from him, but time was not an ally she had on her side. A user of the dark side as vile as Murphy was astoundingly dangerous, and he would have found a way to escape long before the interrogation was finished, leaving her with nothing.

Nothing was definitely not what she had now. Amanda had no clue that Milder had surgically implanted a combination of bug and tracking device inside her, and it was now registering her location as clear as a bell. Moreover, she had a tiny piece of the crystal in Milder’s lightsaber implanted in her as well so Milder could easily track her through the Force. Add that to the plethora of surveillance equipment that she had planted in the _Ebon Hawk,_ and there was no doubt that all of Milo Murphy’s secrets would soon be hers.

And once she had finally exposed the monster’s treachery to the galaxy, she would be able to make her move. The Republic was in shambles. Once the people knew the Jedi had returned, they would flock to _her_ for leadership, not that mutant Fletcher. Jedi had once led the Republic before, and they would again.

Though perhaps it should not stay the Republic, she reflected. Democracy was all well and good on a local level, even a planetary one, but the galaxy’s needs were not served by it. It invited corruption and inefficiency.

What they needed…was an empire.

And Milder knew of only one candidate qualified enough to be its first empress.


	10. Śfard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the crew of the Ebon Hawk make their way to Nar Shaddaa, new allies, new enemies, and new complications arise.

Amanda paced around the cargo hold of the _Ebon Hawk,_ hoping desperately that she wasn’t making a mistake. The mistake in question hadn’t been to rescue Milo and his friends. One only needed to spend five minutes in their company to know that they weren’t the nefarious masterminds that Milder thought they were.

No, the mistake had been deciding to join them in their quest to stop the imminent Pistachion threat. Amanda was used to working in a chain of command, of having clear and direct plans. Of course, in her experience, plans invariably went shuura-shaped, but the point was that they _existed._ Plans were calming. Plans were a symbol of defiance to the chaotic, entropic universe.

And they did not have one. Granted, with Milo around, it may well have been impossible to keep _to_ a plan, but that was not an excuse to not _try._ They should have been making lists and identifying variables and figuring out worst case scenarios. They were not doing anything of the kind.

That’s not to say that they were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs on their long journey to Nar Shaddaa. Despite Milo’s claims that Murphy’s Law did not function in hyperspace, Zack was piloting the ship much slower than usual just in case. That didn’t appear to make much sense to Amanda, but then again, what did these days? Milo and Melissa were taking advantage of the extra time to work on Milo’s training and spent a lot of their time together. Sara was tinkering with the _Hawk’s_ equipment, trying to find ways to get it to run smoother and more efficiently. Baljeet appeared to be spending most of his time reading, and got very annoyed whenever he was interrupted.

That left Amanda alone most of the time. At least, that’s what she told herself. She knew the truth, though. They were avoiding her because they didn’t trust her. They thought she was playing them. And though Amanda tried to pretend otherwise, that hurt. Their lack of trust hurt.

If it had been just Zack, that would have been understandable. Zack was paranoid to the max, but, then again, so was _every_ smuggler of his caliber, because if they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t be _alive_ to distrust people. He even distrusted _Melissa,_ and that was just silly. Melissa wouldn’t hurt a fly.

But it was _everyone._ Even Milo looked at her suspiciously at times. Heck, even _Diogee_ was wary of spending too much time with her. Perhaps, Amanda reflected, part of the problem was her isolation. If she made an effort to reach out to people, maybe she could give them a chance to get to know her. Zack was probably a lost cause, but maybe if she got Milo on her side, Zack would at least stop arguing to dump her at the nearest spaceport.

After constructing a 27 step plan to gain Milo’s trust, Amanda felt loads better. She would never understand people who didn’t like making plans. She walked out of the cargo hold and promptly collided with Milo was he was trying to enter the room. Both of them were knocked to the ground.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Milo said as he dusted himself off, and offered him her hand. She took it. It was soft and smooth and warm.

“It’s quite all right, Milo,” Amanda said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.” Why was he staring at her like that? Did he think she was lying about _that_ too?

“Uh, you can let go of my hand now,” Milo said, and it was only then that Amanda realized that she was still holding Milo’s hand. She flushed scarlet as she released the hand, coughing nervously.

Did she have a crush on Milo? Of course she didn’t. That would be ridiculous. Milo was the embodiment of chaos and she was the embodiment of order. Even the very concept was utterly preposterous. Yes, he was _really_ cute and surprisingly muscular, especially in the tank top that he was wearing now, and she couldn’t help but notice the sweat that was glistening on –

“Amanda, did you hit your head or something?” Milo asked, looking legitimately worried. “You’re just staring at me.”

Amanda cleared her throat and gave him a professional smile, grateful for the excuse that had just been handed to her on a silver platter. “Yes…just a small bump. I’m a little disoriented, that’s all. You were here to see me?”

If Amanda had one flaw – well, one flaw that she _acknowledged_ as a flaw instead of an asset – it was her propensity to fall in love with people who weren’t just out of her league, but _planets_ away from it. Milo wouldn’t be one of those people, of course. She didn’t have a crush; it was completely impossible.

If she _had_ a crush, which she manifestly did not, then it would have been for naught anyway. Milo and Zack were in love with one another, and that did _not_ look like it was in danger of changing anytime soon. Milo probably didn’t even _like_ women, much less her. Which was fine, because she didn’t have a crush, so it wouldn’t have been relevant anyway.

“Yeah, I just wanted to see how you were doing,” Milo said, seeming to ignore the torrent of denial that doubtlessly showed on her face as plain as day. “I’m sorry that you’ve gotten such a cold reception. You saved our lives, and I’m sure my friends will come around eventually.”

Amanda smiled, genuinely touched. Milo didn’t even _know_ her, and he was going out of his way to reassure her anyway. “So maybe we can use this time to come up with a plan for what happens when we get to Nar Shaddaa,” she suggested hopefully.

“Well, I know you like plans, but in my experience, they just get in the way. Preparation, not planning, is what gets me through things.”

Amanda crossed her arms. “But maybe you can humor me just this once? You know, in the name of fostering trust between us?”

Milo shrugged. “Look, I’m honestly not the right person to ask. Zack’s our Nar Shaddaa expert. But he says he hasn’t been there in a year, and that’s a long time there. There are constant shifts in power; for all he knows, all of his contacts could be dead now. We won’t know until we get there.”

Despite her expectations to the contrary, Amanda was actually feeling more reassured now. It was probably because they now _had_ a plan of sorts, even if it was just one step of it. They would try to track down Zack’s contacts and pump them for information. It was a solid next step. “Thanks for checking in, Milo. I appreciate it.”

Milo gave her a thumbs up and left the room without another word.

A crush on _Milo._ What an absurd idea.

*****

“I think Amanda has the hots for you,” Melissa announced casually, and then she kicked Milo in the face. The combined shock of the sudden physical attack and her ridiculous claim caused him to drop his sword.

In retrospect, he probably should have seen it coming. They had spent all morning dueling with the two vibroswords she had bought on Citadel Station, and Melissa had been resorting to increasingly distracting measures to throw him off his game. She had used their bond to spread all sorts of phantom sensations, from extreme temperatures to memories that tricked his body into thinking it was suffering from a respiratory ailment. The enemy, she pointed out, wasn’t going to play fair, so she saw no reason why she should either.

Melissa’s techniques may have been unorthodox, but there was no doubt that they were effective. Even without an actual lightsaber, he had learned more under her tutelage in days than he had in years at the Jedi Temple. Her knowledge of Force techniques was impressive, if a bit uneven, especially for someone who had been, to the best of his knowledge, a mere Padawan when she left the Order.

“Amanda does not have the hots for Zack,” Milo said sternly. “He’s a smuggler and she used to be a cop. I mean, I can’t _blame_ her if she did, but that’s a moot point, because she doesn’t.” 

Melissa sheathed her sword and leaned against a wall. “I didn’t say she had the hots for _Zack._ I said she had the hots for _you.”_

Milo laughed. “Okay, first, can we stop saying ‘have the hots,’ cause it’s getting kind of weird, and second, that’s even _more_ ridiculous. I mean, she _does_ know that I’m gay, right? And that Zack and I are together.”

Melissa shrugged. “Oh, come on, Milo. You’re telling me you’ve never crushed on a straight guy before? Sometimes, these things just don’t line up. Anyway, how would she know you’re gay and not bi like Zack?”

That was a legitimate enough point, but still, the idea that _one_ person he ran into on this voyage they were on would be into him was ludicrous enough. The idea that _two_ people would be into him was so ludicrous that it defied belief. It was the kind of improbable coincidence that only happened…all the time around him. Oh. Crap.

“What should I do?” he wondered.

Melissa thought about it for a while, and then suddenly her sword was back in her hand and pointed at his throat. “You shouldn’t let your guard down, that’s what you should do.”

“I thought the duel was over!” he protested.

“The duel is over when one of us surrenders or gets knocked out,” Melissa reminded him.

Milo sighed. Sometimes, he thought that Melissa took her training techniques a little too far. But she meant well, and that was apparent. Heck, even _Zack_ appeared to have come around to trusting her, or at least not actively distrusting her. When he asked him about that, all Zack had said was that they had come to an understanding. “Okay, Melissa. I surrender.”

“BOOM!” Melissa said, raising her sword into the air in triumph. “Okay, remember, we’ve got Malacia training this afternoon, so don’t be late!”

Milo’s stomach was definitely not looking forward to that. Malacia was a technique that disrupted the equilibrium of a target’s body, forcing an incapacitating dizziness and nausea in them. They had used each other to train on, since understandably none of the organics in the _Hawk_ wanted to participate, and Milo still hadn’t mastered the art of resisting the technique without throwing up, or incapacitating Melissa with it, although he _had_ come close last time.

“Oh, and as for what you should do about Amanda,” Melissa said, sheathing her sword again, “you should most definitely do nothing. Don’t bring it up to her at all. If things get problematic, I’ll have a chat with her.” She patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and then strode out of the room.

His lesson done for the morning, Milo wandered into the cockpit to sit next to Zack. He spent most of his time there, carefully avoiding looking out the window whenever he could. There was something about hyperspace that freaked him out. Perhaps it was just the alien nature of it, the fact that nothing about it felt _right_ in the Force. Or maybe it was just the fact that Murphy’s Law didn’t _exist_ there. Everything that could go wrong _wasn’t_ going wrong, and it was just a profoundly unsettling feeling.

“Hey, so, um, Melissa said something, and I don’t want you to freak out or take this the wrong way,” Milo blurted out. He didn’t want to tell Zack about Melissa’s bizarre theory, but communication was key to any relationship and maybe they could both laugh about it. “Uh, she said that Amanda has a crush on me.”

Zack gave him a look that said, quite succinctly, that he was being an idiot. “Yeah, I don’t think that she had to invade _her_ mind to figure _that_ out.”

Milo just stared at him. “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” Zack asked. “It may have escaped your notice, Milo, but you’re quite the catch. You’re a sweet guy with a big heart. You’d be surprised how few people that describes in the galaxy.”

“You’re not bothered?” Milo asked. He was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Zack’s lips.

“Nah, man,” Zack said, sounding as completely unconcerned as Milo suspected he was. “If anything, I feel sorry for her. Unrequited love is the _worst._ You want my advice, you nip this in the bud as soon as possible.”

“Melissa gave me the exact opposite advice,” Milo said. “What should I do?”

Zack shrugged. “I don’t know, man. Just do whatever you think is best. Maybe she’s right, maybe I am. Who knows? Look, if she brings it up, be nice about it, but also be very clear. She’s not going to make a fuss.”

Milo kissed Zack on the cheek. He wanted, so desperately, to save that he loved Zack, but he knew that those words shouldn’t be tossed around cavalierly. His first time saying it would be at a special moment, and this wasn’t it. Besides, he knew he didn’t need to say it. Zack understood.

*****

Sara had no clue why they were going to Nar Shaddaa first. Or at all, for that matter, given that the extremely deadly criminal organization that was after Milo was _headquartered_ there. Why would a respected Jedi Master like Nolan Mitchell even _be_ on a planet that Zack had described as making wretched hives of scum and villainy look like pleasure domes?

But all of her attempts to argue that they should be starting their voyage on Dantooine, a nice, quiet bucolic planet were for naught. Zack had argued that Mitchell was likely to be in the most amount of danger on the Smuggler’s Moon, so he should be their first priority, and once Milo had heard that argument, further discussion was bootless. At least they hadn’t gone to _Korriban_ first. There were all sorts of horror stories about how the tombs in the graveyard of the Sith past drove would-be plunderers insane.

Zack had filled her in on Melissa’s behavior in the academy, and Sara wished she was more surprised than she was. After all, the girl that she had known would never have tried to invade someone’s mind like that, much less someone Milo cared for. But that girl was gone, and Melissa stood in her place. It had been that way since Milo – she mentally cut herself off. Best not to even think of those things.

Sara wanted to get rid of Melissa, to dump her somewhere on Nar Shaddaa, but she wasn’t going to do that. First of all, she wasn’t about to ask Milo to choose between them; that was a recipe for disaster, even if he made the right choice. Second of all, the only thing she was more worried about than having Melissa close by was having her _not_ close by and plotting against them from afar.

“Sara, are you okay?” Milo asked her, and Sara must have jumped halfway to the ceiling in fright. She spun around to see Milo, kneeling down behind her, petting Diogee.

“Yes, I’m fine!” Sara said in a tone that sounded horrendously unconvincing even to her own ears. “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“Maybe because you’ve been staring at that part in your hand for the last twenty minutes without even noticing that I’ve been here all along?” Milo said as he stood up.

Sara laughed and mussed up Milo’s hair playfully, like she used to do to him back when he was a kid. In some ways, he still was, really. “Ah, you were always too observant for your own good, Milo. I just got lost in thought. Look, you and Melissa, you’re doing all this sword fighting. Does that mean that you’re planning to fight with a lightsaber again?”

Milo was silent for a long while, long enough that Sara was starting to worry when he finally answered her. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I can just go to the store and buy one. I’d have to construct one, and those parts are _not_ cheap, or easy to find. And…I don’t know if I want to.”

 _There we go,_ Sara thought. Aloud, she said, “It can’t have been easy to see Milder using your lightsaber. I’m honestly amazed that she _kept_ it all this time. She must have been more obsessed with you than I thought.”

Milo nodded, though he didn’t appear to be listening to her. She knew, from vast experience, that he was thinking of something that was bothering him, but didn’t want to tell her because she was worried how she’d react. “What’s up, Milo? I can tell something’s bothering you. Spit it out.”

Milo started pacing around the room. Wow. Whatever it was must have been _bad._ Sara _really_ hoped they weren’t going to start talking about the Mass Shadow Generator. Every time they did, it always provoked terrible nightmares in her when she went next to sleep. “I’m really worried about you going on this journey with us,” Milo said eventually. “You could get hurt!”

Ah. That made sense. Milo had absolutely no regard for his own safety, but the moment someone _else’s_ safety came into question, he became the galaxy’s biggest worrywart. Having Zack around was bad enough, but Zack had combat training and all sorts of experience dealing with dangerous sorts in the criminal underworld. And though Sara had, in fact, gotten a fair bit of combat experience under her belt while working for the Ithorians, Milo didn’t know about that (and neither had the Ithorians most of the time).

“You’re right,” Sara said eventually. “I _could_ get hurt. But I won’t. With you, Melissa, Zack, and now Amanda on my side, I’m the safest woman in the galaxy.” Diogee barked reproachfully at her. “And this little cutie here, can’t forget about him!”

Milo looked more reassured, especially when Diogee, with the help of some whispered commands from Sara, started jumping on him and covering him with slobber. “Diogee! You’re not supposed to be trying to drown me in drool!”

Sara grabbed Milo by both arms and looked him straight in the eyes. “You don’t need to worry about me, Milo. I’m in this journey for the long haul. We will keep each other safe. I won’t let anything happen to you, and you won’t let anything happen to me. Now you give me a hug, okay? That’s an order from your older sister!”

Never let it be said that Milo couldn’t follow orders when need be.

*****

The Smuggler’s Moon was always said to be a cruel mistress, and Zack should have remembered that. But time away from Nar Shaddaa must have made him soft. After spending the better part of a day searching for a parking spot to land their ship, when he had finally found an empty space, he thought that his troubles were over. How wrong he was.

The moment they all exited the ship, they were faced with a dozen men pointing blaster rifles at them. That wasn’t the problem. Hell, it was practically _hospitable_ compared to some of the other welcomes he’d gotten on Nar Shaddaa. No, the problem was the Twi’lek standing in front of them with the biggest smirk that Zack had ever seen. 

“Well, well,” Lyle Johansen said, not even bothering to keep the smugness out of his voice. “What brings the high and mighty Zack Underwood to _my_ landing pad? Without a permit, I might add. Or an _invitation.”_

Lyle had been one of the singers of the Lumberzacks, but that, of course, was not the problem, because the Lumberzacks had always been about more than just corny songs artificially manufactured to appeal to teenage girls. It had been, first and foremost, a front, and the last thing he wanted was for Milo to learn what it was a front for from _Lyle_ of all people. Even for someone in his field, Lyle was a first class asshole. It was time to take decisive action.

Unfortunately, Melissa had the same idea. She stepped in front of Lyle and waved her hand in his face. “You _will_ let us keep our ship here without incident.”

“I will let you keep your ship here without incident,” Lyle said in a tone, then added in a very much _not_ monotone voice, “WHEN MUSTAFAR FREEZES OVER! You seriously have a _Jedi_ as a girlfriend now, Zack? And you come here to Nar Shaddaa when you _know_ there’s a bounty on her? How dumb _are_ you?

“I am _not_ his girlfriend!” Melissa protested, sounding even more annoyed about being labeled as Zack’s girlfriend than her mind trick failing.

“What she means is that we’re not exclusive, Lyle,” Zack said hurriedly, aiming a ferocious glare at Melissa. If Lyle wanted to think that he and Melissa were a thing, he was more than willing to not correct him, though certainly not to go any farther. Melissa was very attractive, but even if he hadn’t been in a monogamous relationship with Milo, the whole “trying to invade his mind” thing had been quite the epic turnoff. The important thing was that Lyle didn’t suspect that he and Milo were involved.

Amanda stepped forward, her arms crossed and her face filled with sternness. Zack’s mind was so consumed with fears that she would start going into a diatribe about the number of laws that Lyle was breaking (when, in fact, he was breaking _zero,_ because the only law on Nar Shaddaa was the law of the jungle) that he missed the first part of what she was actually saying.

“…which will gain you _absolutely nothing_ but a messy death. She faced off against a _Sith Lord_ and lived to tell the tale. What chance do you and your men have?” She let that sink in for just enough time to get him worrying but not enough time to let that worry turn to anger, and then went on. “On the other hand, we can pay you for letting us dock here.”

Anyone else would not have been able to read the expression on Lyle’s face, but Zack had played sabacc with him often enough to know that he was on the hook. “I got a client scheduled to meet here. The Red Eclipse. They’re not going to be happy when they hear I stiffed them.”

Zack did not like the sound of that. The Red Eclipse was one of the deadliest gangs on Nar Shaddaa. They exclusively trafficked in slaves, and they were rumored to be so good at what they did that they were able to enslave some of the deadliest sentient species in the galaxy.

“Well, we have a client too, and he has _exceptionally_ deep pockets,” Amanda said. “Enough to compensate you for the loss of your business and then some. It’s a good deal and you know it, Lyle.”

Lyle did indeed know it, and by the slight smile that was now gracing his face, the deal had already been struck, even if it wasn’t quite formal yet. “Another of your girlfriends, Underwood? They’re both very smart – I guess it’s true that opposites attract.”

Amanda put her arm around Zack’s shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, he has other qualities, I assure you, Lyle. Do we have a deal?”

“We do indeed,” Lyle said, with one of those mock courtly bows that the ladies couldn’t get enough of. Thank the Force he was straight. The last thing Zack needed was him turning those charms on Milo. “Perhaps I could interest one of you lovely young ladies in dining with me?”

“I’ll break your neck if you lay a finger on me,” Melissa said flatly. Zack braced himself for his end, but Lyle just laughed. “You sure chopped away at _her_ heart, Zack. Head’s up, though: If the Red Eclipse want their parking spot, I’m sending them after you.” With a flirtatious wink at Amanda, he and his minions left them alone.

There were a few moments of silence, which was broken by Amanda saying, “What? I’ve gone undercover before. I know how these things are done.”

Zack nodded slowly. He wasn’t surprised at all about that. In his experience, no one was better at pretending to be a criminal than a cop. What he _had_ been surprised at was the kiss. If Amanda was trying to make Milo jealous, then they might end up having problems. But for all he knew, it was just a method to sell the con. Nothing to worry about. Yet. Not when they had so many _other_ things to worry about.

Baljeet clapped his hands, bringing him out of his reverie. “So now that we are here, I assume that you have a plan?”

Amanda rolled her eyes, but the joke was on her, because Zack actually _did_ have a plan. “We have a problem,” he began, “and that problem is the Society of the Dragon. Finding Mitchell is great and all, but our first priority is great and all figuring exactly what they want with Milo. So I say we give them exactly what they want. Let’s make as much noise as possible, and hand Milo to them on a silver platter.”

“When I said I wanted a plan, I meant one that wouldn’t get you all horrifically killed,” Baljeet retorted.

“Ah, but you haven’t heard the whole plan yet,” Zack said. He told them the whole plan that he had come up with. The general response to it appeared to be horror, mixed with perhaps just the slightest amount of admiration, and a plentiful helping of –

“ARE YOU INSANE?!” Sara shouted so loudly that they probably heard it in the next galaxy over. “That is easily the craziest plan I’ve ever heard.”

“And that,” Zack said with a smirk, “is precisely why it’s going to work.”

*****

Vinnie Dakota would never be considered one of the best bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa, and he worked hard to make sure that was the case. Being among the best was the equivalent of painting a target on your back. He wasn’t considered one of the worst either. He was thoroughly and utterly average. He was the kind of bounty hunter you hired to capture targets who were annoying but not worth shelling out the kind of credits necessary to hire the best.

While his contemporaries in the profession were motivated by bloodlust, a desire to prove themselves, or staggering amounts of ego, Dakota cared about three things: credits, staying alive, and doing good. True, he wasn’t rolling in cash like the best of the best, but he had enough money to be comfortable, and Dakota _liked_ being comfortable. The payments he wasn’t receiving weren’t humungous, but they were steady and plentiful, and all those credits added up after a while. 

Staying alive was easy enough, too. Dakota disliked direct confrontation. He preferred to strike at his targets from afar, or lull them into complacency and attack them from behind with one of the nerve strikes he had learned during his time in Republic special forces. He didn’t take risks, and he was willing to wait weeks for the perfect moment if need be.

Doing good was a lot tougher. In technical terms, there was probably no way to do good on Nar Shaddaa, at least not in a lasting manner. If Dakota took down ten scumbags, there’d be ten more – or even eleven more sometimes – instantly replacing them. But, and this was the important part, those scumbags would be _gone._ Murderers, rapists, and slavers alike had gone off to fates that doubtlessly involved death. The families of their victims would have vengeance; their surviving victims would have justice.

Everyone on Nar Shaddaa had an enemy, and every enemy was willing to pay Dakota’s lower than average fees to get rid of that enemy. The enemy may have been as powerful as a crime boss or as powerless as a slave, but Dakota took their money nonetheless. (He always offered to do the jobs for free for the really powerless, of course. He wasn’t a monster.)

Dakota had survived as long as he did on Nar Shaddaa by staying under the radar, at least in terms of the _really_ big players. So it was therefore quite alarming indeed when he received a message “inviting” him to the _Törcsvár,_ the spaceship of the voivode of the Society of the Dragon. It was, of course, not an invitation he could refuse. So he let his partner manage things in his absence and got on his shuttle.

Hoping against hope that there had just been a mix-up, he had docked his shuttle in the _Törcsvár’s_ landing bay and made his ways through the halls of the spaceship. The décor of the place was at least ten thousand years out of date, deliberately arcane. The halls were shadowy, lit only by flaming torches, the walls were made of stone, and the place smelled positively awful. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought he was in a castle. And not just any castle, but one like those featured in holodramas featuring energy vampires like _The Curse of the Castle of Count Utarefson!_.

Finally, after what felt like hours of wandering through a maze of hallways that he swore shifted layout every so often, he reached Voivode Drako’s boardroom. A colorful collection of his crooked compatriots awaited him there, as well as the very conspicuous absence of Drako himself.

There was that damn cyborg garu-bear who had beaten him to quite a few bounties over the last few months. He was really starting to be a nuisance. He didn’t even _do_ anything with the money, just let it accumulate in his den somewhere. Many would-be treasure hunters thought they could grab the money while the garu-bear was sleeping, only to be eaten for their hubris. The whole thing was just _unbearable._

There were those weird droids who had just shown up on Nar Shaddaa a few weeks ago with a friendly word for everyone they met. On Nar Shaddaa, that instantly translated to “easy mark,” but in the case of the Normans, it ended up translating to “crushed skulls.” No one knew what they wanted, and Dakota was very sure that he didn’t want to find out.

There were the Diminutives, clones of the legendary bounty hunter Dr. Diminutive, who had perished while hunting down Phineas. Individually, they were a lot less threatening than their progenitor, but there was a small army of them and they could easily overwhelm many targets with pure numbers. If their prowess at bounty hunting matched their ego, they’d be completely unstoppable.

And lastly, there were the Chloes, identical twins that had been the protegees of Darth Hypatia, one of Mechanus’s most trusted apprentices. According to Dakota’s partner, they were actually pretty weak in the Force, but the fact that they had access to it at _all_ made them a terrifying threat to all but the most skilled. They specialized in vicious, brutal killings, often involving the removal of the target’s limbs.

As they waited for their host, a servant served them all wine, even the droids, while they glared at each other suspiciously. Well, everyone except the cyborg garu-bear. Dakota wasn’t even sure he was sentient. And what sort of moron would go out of their way to make a _garu-bear_ even more deadly?

“So how’s everyone doing tonight?” Dakota asked, if only because the silence was starting to get to him. “I bet we’re going to get some great business opportunities here. With big payoffs! Am I right? Up top!” He held out his hand to the nearest individual, one of the Chloes, who looked at him like he would be _lucky_ to be considered a speck of mud that she needed to wipe off her absurdly expensive shoe.

“I am doing great!” one of the Normans said in that nauseatingly perky voice. “I killed thirty nine people in the last twenty four hours alone! It has been a good day!” Dakota slowly inched his chair away from him.

There was a clearing of a throat, as the servant sat in a chair in the front of the room. And then he abruptly transformed. One moment, he was just an ordinary, unassuming servant, and the next he was Voivode Kyle Drako, dressed in evening dress as always. Dakota had heard rumors of Drako’s psionic powers and he was _not_ happy to have those rumors confirmed.

“Greetings, my guests,” Drako said with a formal half-bow. “While aboard the _Törcsvár,_ you are under my protection. I will see that no harm comes to you here, provided you extend the same courtesy to me, and to each other.” And Drako meant it, Dakota knew. The voivode was famous for insisting that the rules of hospitality be followed. He had once scuttled a _very_ profitable business deal because the prospective partner had attacked one of Drako’s servants. The moron’s body was never found.

Drako snapped his fingers and a servant, a real one this time, held up a _daguerreotype_ – it wasn’t even a photograph, it was an actual _daguerreotype_ – of Milo Murphy, taken in what looked like Citadel Station. “This is Milo Murphy,” Drako said. “He is a Jedi. I want him located and captured _alive._ This is very important. He is no good to me dead. If you kill him, you die in turn. As do your loved ones. As do your homeworlds.”

Dakota knew that speaking up would be risky, but if he didn’t, he’d probably die of curiosity. And on top of that, he had to know if his partner’s identity was compromised. “Why am _I_ here, sire? I haven’t exactly tangled with Jedi before.”

“You have a reputation for bringing in targets alive on a consistent basis,” Drako explained. “These people may let their bloodlust get the better of them, but you do not.”

Dakota breathed a sigh of relief, since that was a reasonable explanation. He indeed preferred to bring in his targets alive, even if dead was an option. He had nothing against killing in self-defense, or even _preemptive_ self-defense (this was Nar Shaddaa, after all), but he drew the line at killing people just because he was getting _paid_ for it. When you looked at it from that perspective, Dakota could see how someone like Drako could respect his professionalism.

“The reward for bringing Jedi Murphy is one billion credits,” Drako went on, and Dakota’s heart skipped a couple of beats. You could buy _Nar Shaddaa itself_ with that much money. And while it wouldn’t exactly _bankrupt_ the Society of the Dragon, it would certainly put a _very_ sizable dent in its coffers. What in the _galaxy_ was so special about Milo Murphy?

So after the meeting was over, he went back to his apartment and asked his partner that very question. He wasn’t expecting an answer. If he was lucky, he’d get one of those non-answers that Jedi were so fond of.

But much to his surprise, Nolan Mitchell gave him a straight answer, and when he was done, Dakota was _really_ wishing he had never asked the question.

*****

Lydia never had nightmares of Katarr. One would think that the wave of destruction that had ended Octalian civilization would feature in her dreams nightly, but it never did. Lydia wished that it had, because what she got instead was far worse.

What she got instead was Katarr as it once was, and as it could have been. Katarr was regularly ranked one of the best places in the galaxy. After no less than _five_ world wars had devastated the planet, the desperate survivors had finally placed the planet under the governance of the Sovereign, an AI designed to rule the planet in the best way possible. And it had done precisely that. It had cleaned up the nuclear radiation, reversed the environmental catastrophes that had brought the Octalians to near extinction, and brought justice, order, and peace to the world.

Life under the Sovereign was glorious. No Octalian child went to bed hungry, no Octalian knew the horrors of war, and no Octalian languished in bondage or servitude. Everyone had the perfect spouses, the perfect job, the perfect _life._ Katarr wasn’t _literally_ perfect _,_ of course. There was still crime and prejudice and poverty. But it was far closer to perfection than most planets in the galaxy were.

And Katarr was beautiful, too. The architecture of the major cities was constructed to seamlessly blend with the natural world. They worked _around_ nature, not _against_ it. Form _and_ function were equally valued in Katarri society. And the natural wonders of Katarr were, in Lydia’s opinion, unmatched in the galaxy. Waterfalls, forests, mountains, deserts, oceans, Katarr had it all.

Lydia had been happy. More than that, she had been positively jubilant. She had two wonderful husbands who adored her, she had just given birth to her first child, and the bookstore that she ran was bringing in so much money that she had been able to afford to go to Coruscant on the _Effulgent,_ one of the galaxy’s best and most expensive cruise spaceships, for her honeymoon.

Then the Sphere of Calamity had appeared. At first, it had been a curiosity, even a welcome one. Things had been going so well on Katarr that life was starting to become boring and predictable. A huge pulsating orange and yellow sphere around which entropy spiked and everything that could go wrong would go wrong? Well, that was the most unpredictable thing possible. For several months, it had basically been a tourist attraction.

And then the worst thing that Lydia could possibly envision happened: The Sphere infected Sovereign. It took a few days for the Octalians to realize it, and by then it was too late. The carefully curated instructions around which the Octalians lived their lives turned to gibberish. People no longer could rely on Sovereign to direct them to their soulmates, their ideal career, or any one of a thousand things. The AI had gone completely insane.

This, to be clear, was not what caused the fall of Katarr. The Octalians could have gotten through things without the guidance of Sovereign. Perhaps there would have been some adverse effects on their civilization, perhaps even a sixth world war, but they would have survived it. The end of Sovereign could even have been a new beginning for Katarr. They could have left the nest and become even greater than they were now.

But it was not to be. Sovereign was not guiding Octalian society, but also the reconstruction efforts on Katarr. Without it constantly pumping decontaminating chemicals into the air, the radiation was beginning to return with a vengeance. Lydia’s first husband got poisoned and died a hideous and painful death. In the end, he was in so much pain that Lydia had no choice but to shoot him in order to spare him further suffering.

The Privy Council was desperate. For one thing, they had just been ornamental fixtures under the rule of Sovereign. They had no experience in actual governance. But they had been well chosen nonetheless, as all of Sovereign’s choices had been, and they made the right choice. They began evacuating the planet. Naturally, that was the exact moment when the aerial defense systems, meant to destroy asteroids that might strike the planet, started turning their attention inward instead of outward, destroying any ship that tried to escape.

Her second husband and their daughter had been in one of them.

And to make matters worse, the Sphere was beginning to expand, at first very slowly, but then with alarming speed. No one knew what happened when the Sphere expanded. No one who was caught in its grasp ever emerged from it. Within one year, it was projected that it would cover the whole planet.

Lydia had been very seriously contemplating the prospect of just getting into her hovercar and driving into the Sphere. There didn’t seem to be much point in waiting for the inevitable, not without her husbands and daughter.

Just as she was turning the keys in the ignition of the hovercar, a ship arrived right in front of her bookstore and Jedi stepped onto the surface of the planet. Not just the one or two that the Privy Council had expected when they sent out their distress call, but scores of them, even hundreds. They had identified the Sphere of Calamity as a manifestation of the dark side, a living storm of entropy that sucked in everything in its path. They had set forth in the Sphere to stop it, and though they failed the first time, they actually _came back._ They wouldn’t say what they had found within, but whatever it was, it had disturbed them greatly.

The second time they went in, the Sphere finally started shrinking. When it withdrew, it revealed charred buildings, completely barren land, and lifeless husks of the Octalians it had enveloped. Inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, it withdrew until it was so small that it could fit into the bookstore. They were so _close_ to destroying it.

And in her dreams, that was precisely what happened. They destroyed the Sphere, the corruption was removed from Sovereign, and Katarr returned to normal. Lydia found new husbands, though she never had any more children, lived out her life, and died in her sleep at the ripe old age of 122. She’d like to think that life indeed happened to an alternate version of her. It was what got her through the day sometimes.

Instead, the Sphere exploded like a bomb and returned to its old state, covering even more terrain than ever before. The Jedi were consumed by it, as if they had never been there. But their ship still was there, and Lydia took it before anyone else could get their hands on it and took to the skies. She watched behind her as the sphere completely encircled the planet, though thankfully for the sake of the galaxy, it did not appear to be able to go any further.

The spaceship drifted through space for what seemed like forever. The hyperdrive had broken thanks to the Sphere’s influence, as well as all its radio systems. Her only hope was that _somehow,_ she’d encounter another spaceship. It was astronomically slim, but Lydia felt that she had survived her planet’s destruction for a reason. And soon enough, she discovered what that reason was. The Jedi had left behind plenty of holocrons, books, and other training material, and once she started perusing them, she realized that she could touch the Force herself. She trained herself how to use a lightsaber, how to move objects with the Force, how to use the Force to heal herself and others.

Finally, after over a year of waiting, a spaceship finally appeared. Not just any spaceship. It was a Republic warship. At least, that was what it looked like from the outside. She had made contact with the warship and expected a warm welcome. What she got was being dragged roughly into the warship by humanoid, bipedal pistachio plants and dumped at the feet of a plant that radiated a hungry, gaping darkness in the Force.

“A Jedi Padawan stands before Darth Pistachion,” Darth Pistachion said with a soft, sibilant voice. “A pawn of the once powerful Jedi, now standing alone. Kneel and you will be my new apprentice. Refuse and die.” He ignited a lightsaber with a blade so black that it seemed to make the room darker just by existing.

Lydia didn’t think of herself as a Jedi, despite having studied the Jedi teachings extensively. She had grave doubts about the effectiveness and merit of the Jedi teachings. But there was no doubt that being a Sith was worse. She’d rather be dead, and honestly, she didn’t think that any way that Darth Pistachion could kill her that would be any worse than the way her first husband had died.

So she kicked him in the groin, not expecting it to have the effect that it did, and ran as far as she could. She barely made it twenty paces before she was suddenly lifted in the air and a pressure formed on her throat. Darth Pistachion’s face was filled with glee as he literally choked the life out of her with the Force. And then just as her vision starting to fade, she fell to the ground.

Standing in front of her was an ordinary looking protocol droid. But judging by the way Darth Pistachion’s face paled and he knelt before it, it was anything but. “Master,” Darth Pistachion said, his voice filled with fear. “I did not know…no, please don’t hurt me! Please! NO!” He screamed in agony, responding to torments that appeared to only exist in his own mind, and then soon fell to the floor unconscious.

The droid grabbed Lydia by the chin and studied her face carefully. “I am Darth Reina, and you are mine now,” it said in a feminine tone. “You will follow the every order of Lord Pistachion and Lord Orgaluth, unless they contradict mine. You serve the Sith now.”

“A _droid_ that can touch the Force?” Lydia said incredulously. “Now I’ve seen _everything.”_

Reina laughed, the laugh sounding distinctly _wrong_ coming out of the droid’s vocoder. “I am as flesh and blood as you are,” she said. “I simply prefer to act from a distance. I admire your defiance, but it is for naught. Your life belongs to the Sith. Accept the inevitable.”

Lydia was as stubborn as they came, but even she knew she was beaten. Besides, if she played along with them, maybe she’d have an opportunity to escape. She knelt before Reina and bent her head before her. “I accept your training…master.”

“Then I hereby name you Darth Śfard,” Reina said, sounding pleased. “You will start your training upon the morrow. But first, it’s time for you to meet Lord Orgaluth.”

A squadron of soldiers escorted Lydia and Reina to a laboratory. Scientists were working frantically, working equipment that looked so arcane that Lydia couldn’t even begin to guess what they did. She didn’t care either. The only thing she cared about was what they were working on, something that she had dearly hoped she would never, _ever_ see again.

It was the Sphere of Calamity.

“WHAT THE KRIFF ARE YOU DOING?!” Lydia screamed at Reina. “That thing destroyed my planet! It could even destroy the universe if left unchecked! It’s an abomination!”

Reina slapped her across the face so hard that she flew across the room. “She is nothing of the kind! She is the answer to the question that has haunted us for as long as we have been able to _ask_ questions. And she is now your master as surely as I am. Lord Pistachion is a brute, and if you cannot respect him, I will understand, but if you disrespect Lord Orgaluth, you will suffer the consequences.”

Lydia nodded jerkily. Every bone in her body hurt. “I will obey, master,” she said, forcing the words out one by one, even though every instinct she had was screaming at her to not submit.

“Yes, you will,” Reina said.

“What’s the question?” Lydia asked. “The question you were talking about.” Instead of answering her, Reina just walked out of the room.

After that day, she had thankfully never had any more contact with Orgaluth. The scientists who were studying her had been slowly driven insane and their minds had degenerated to the point where they were pretty much now vegetables. If only she could say the same about Darths Pistachion and Reina.

Over the several years that she spent as a prisoner aboard the _Ravager,_ she never once saw Reina in the flesh. Sometimes she possessed bodies of rank and file Pistachions and sometimes she spoke through droids. She was hard but fair, pushing Lydia to the brink of her endurance but never beyond it. As much as she hated to admit it, the elusive Sith Lord was quite an able teacher. When Reina was running the show, she would suffer, but it would serve a purpose.

The same could decidedly not be said of Darth Pistachion, who continuously showed himself to be a sadistic, crazed psychopath with all the teaching skills of a rancor. He gave her impossible tasks and when she invariably failed him, she would be tortured with Force lightning for hours at a time. She was sure that if Reina had not specifically wanted her alive, Darth Pistachion would have killed her long ago.

On her last day aboard the _Ravager,_ Darth Pistachion summoned her to the bridge and removed a datapad from his pocket. It displayed a hologram of a human face, a male one, open and honest. Lydia had almost forgotten what such a kind countenance _looked_ like.

“This is Milo Murphy, a Jedi. Lord Reina’s intelligence indicates that he is on his way to Nar Shaddaa.” Lydia was somewhat surprised to hear this. It had been quite some time since she had heard from Reina in any form. “You will go there, find him, and end him.”

Lydia’s hearts soared. Finally, a chance to escape from the horror that was the _Ravager_! But, as if he could sense her thoughts (and he probably could), Darth Pistachion forced her to kneel with the Force, not using telekinesis, but simply reaching into the parts of her mind that controlled movement and activating them manually. “You will be implanted with a tracking device that will double as a potent explosive. Deviate from your mission even slightly, and it will be the last thing you do.”

He handed her the datapad. _Sorry, Milo Murphy,_ Lydia thought wearily, _but if it’s a choice between your life and mine, I know which one I’m choosing._


	11. Welcome to Paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nar Shaddaa has many surprises in store for Milo, including a daring rescue, a mysterious man who claims to know Zack, and a pot dating back to the days of Xim the Despot.

Milo hadn’t even spent ten minutes on Nar Shaddaa before he came to the conclusion that he despised the moon with every fiber of his being, although it took him considerably longer to figure out why. It wasn’t the fact that it was an ecumenopolis, a planet-wide city. Milo had grown up on Coruscant, after all. Nor was it the fact that it was a dusty, smelly, garish place, with holobillboards on every street corner advertising the newest holoprojectors or weaponry or drugs. It wasn’t the fact that the noise emanating from various nightclubs and houses of quite ill repute were giving Milo a splitting headache, or the fact that it was a place where the powerful oppressed the powerless and no one could stop them.

It was the fact that it _radiated_ the dark side to a level unlike anything that Milo had ever felt before. It wasn’t the sick, pulsating, nauseating feeling that he had sometimes got when he had the misfortune to be around Mechanus when he had one of his famous rages. It was even worse than that. It was spread out, pervasive, like a lake in which Milo was drowning. It took him so long to notice it because there was nothing to contrast it _with._ It felt like the light side didn’t even _exist_ on Nar Shaddaa.

There was rage, and fear, and a dull ache of hopelessness, and it emanated from every being. The tormentors were just as trapped in their own ways as the tormented, even though they did not know it. Nar Shaddaa was a predator, and once you were upon its surface, it would not relinquish its prey until it had sucked all the goodness that could possibly exist within you from your very soul.

How had Zack survived on this planet without becoming a monster?

Milo wished that Zack was beside him to ask that very question, but he was not. As part of Zack’s plan, Milo was left to his own devices, more or less. “Let Milo be Milo,” were his exact words. He wasn’t alone, of course. Amanda was serving as his bodyguard and Baljeet had also joined them. But Zack had decided that he’d just end up trying to change Milo so that he blended in more, so he and Melissa had gone out on their own to see how things stood with Zack’s contacts. Sara was guarding the ship.

They hadn’t gotten very far – seriously, they had barely even rounded the _corner_ – before they ran into a manifestation of Nar Shaddaa’s darkness. A pair of Rodians were towering over a Nautolan child. There was a knife in one of their hands, and Milo didn’t like the look in their eyes at _all._

Amanda immediately went for her blaster, but Baljeet grabbed her arm. “Remember what Zack said. We need to let Milo handle this.”

Milo charged forward, feeling an anger he had scarcely felt before, not since the Mandalorian Wars, when seeing children dead upon the field of battle or among the civilian casualties that the Mandalorians had left behind was a depressingly frequent occurrence. He would be _damned_ if he let any child get harmed ever again. “You leave her alone! Leave her alone right now!”

The Rodians turned to face Milo, and then they burst into laughter. “What are you, some sort of Jedi? What do you care?”

If that wasn’t a straight line, then Milo’s name wasn’t Milo Danger Murphy. “That’s absolutely right. I _am_ a Jedi.” It was time to take a risk. He waved his hand in front of the knife wielding Rodian’s face and reached out into his mind. “You _will_ drop that knife and report your behavior to the police.”

Instead of obeying the suggestion, the Rodian grabbed the child and put the knife to her throat. The other Rodian burst out laughing. “You silly boy. There _are_ no police on the Smuggler’s Moon. Let’s see if your so-called Force powers will stop me from opening up her throat.”

Amanda drew her blaster with lightning quick speed and pointed it at the head of the Rodian not wielding the knife. But the knife wielding Rodian just pulled out a second knife and hurled it into his partner’s chest. The unlucky Rodian took two steps and then fell dead to the ground.

A few drops of turquoise blood started falling to the ground as the Rodian started cutting the child’s throat with painstaking slowness. By the smile on his face, he knew exactly how much she was suffering and wanted Milo to enjoy every second of it. Amanda tried to aim her blaster at the Rodian, but she didn’t have a clear shot.

Milo had only one option left to him. He reached deeply into the Force, trying desperately to ignore the pull of the dark side that was trying to bring him towards it, almost as if it was some sort of physical entity, and he extended his awareness so that he was encompassing the various systems of the Rodian’s body. He saw it as energy, flowing through the body, a symbiotic process, a delicate ecosystem that could be disrupted if he just pushed in _just_ the right way…

A torrent of vomit, mixed with blood, erupted from the Rodian’s mouth and slammed into the wall opposite them. The Rodian dropped the knife, staggered, and then fell unconscious to the ground. Milo felt for a pulse and felt relieved when he found one. He didn’t kill when he could avoid it, and his principles weren’t worth compromising for scum like the Rodian.

“Are you okay?” he asked the child. He couldn’t exactly _blame_ her for screaming in such a high pitched manner that it nearly burst his eardrums and then running as far as she could until she was just a speck in the distance, but it still wasn’t _quite_ the reaction that he had been hoping for.

Amanda pointed her blaster at the unconscious Rodian’s head, but Milo grabbed her arm and forced it to her side. “We do not kill the defenseless,” he said, his voice slightly reproachful. Then he pitched it louder, so that the now quite large crowd of sentients who had gathered to watch the fight could hear him. “I am a Jedi, and Jedi protect the weak. The Order has sent me to liberate Nar Shaddaa from the thrall of the Society of the Dragon! All who stand in our way will experience the consequences! From now on, the innocent are under my protection!”

Astonishingly, there was actual applause from some of the crowd, mostly sentients that Milo pegged as refugees and/or slaves, but also from some of the more hardened looking sentients that were much more likely to be classed as oppressors than oppressed. Milo wasn’t sure what was up with that. Maybe they just enjoyed a good fight?

Baljeet quickly took Milo over to the side as the crowd dissipated. “Are you insane? You’re placing _all_ the innocents of Nar Shaddaa under your protection? You realize that they’re going to kill innocents just to hurt you, don’t you?”

Milo did know that. He also knew that this would be entirely their choice. “I can handle this, Baljeet. I know what I’m doing.”

“If you’re wrong, it’s going to be a problem,” Baljeet warned him. “And if you’re right…that’s going to be an even bigger problem.”

Amanda kicked the Rodian in the face just as he was about to regain consciousness again, sending him back into the realms of unconsciousness and then joined Milo and Baljeet. Milo felt like he _should_ be saying something against that, but then he remembered the look on the child’s face, and decided against it. It hadn’t been fear. It had been resignation.

Milo knew that he couldn’t save Nar Shaddaa. But that didn’t make the fact that it was impossible hurt any less.

*****

“So maybe you could give me a hint about your evil plans?” Zack asked Melissa as the two of them made their way to the cantina that had served more or less as Zack’s home base during his last couple trips to Nar Shaddaa.

“Well, first I’m going to turn Milo into a gorpion,” Melissa said, her voice completely deadpan. “A harmless little gorpion. And then I’ll put that gorpion into a box, and then I’ll put that box into another box, and then I’ll mail that box to myself, and when it arrives I’ll SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER!” She let out a maniacal laugh that echoed through the streets. “It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, I tell you! Genius, I say!”

Zack put his hands on his hips and glared at her steadily. Melissa let out a chuckle. “Come on, Zack, what kind of supervillain would I be if I monologued about my plans before showtime? All you need to know is that Milo will not be harmed, and provided you don’t get in my way, neither will you.”

Well, it had been worth a shot. Zack wasn’t particularly bothered by the fact that Melissa had some sort of diabolical scheme in mind. He believed Melissa when she said that Milo getting harmed was strictly off the agenda, and that was all that mattered to him. “What do you think of my plan?”

“Well, provided that Milo doesn’t get horrifically murdered during the course of it, it’s a pretty darn good one,” Melissa admitted. “I notice that it involved getting me away from him, too.”

Zack shrugged. “We needed to keep a high profile, and we can’t do that with you mind-tricking everyone in sight into forgetting what they’ve seen.”

Melissa put a hand to her chest in a melodramatic fashion. “How could you say such a completely accurate thing? Who wouldn’t trust me, the Queen of Air and Darkness?”

“I couldn’t even begin to imagine,” Zack muttered, as they rounded a corner and approached the cantina. “We’re here. Remember, Your Majesty, let me do the talking. And no mind tricks!”

Melissa pouted theatrically, but allowed Zack to lead her into the cantina. Zack stopped in his tracks when he saw the building before him. It was barely classified as a cantina at all. It wasn’t even a _bar._ It was a _tavern_ now. It was _respectable._ The bloodstains, beverage stains, and stains that one’s sanity simply demanded _never_ be identified were all gone now. The place was _clean._ It was actually _clean!_ Gone was the pervasive smell of various drugs being smoked, replaced by what smelled like _air freshener._

“Kriffing hell, they _gentrified_ the place!” Zack swore.

“I’m sorry, sir, but such language is not tolerated in this establishment,” a waiter informed him.

“Sorry,” Zack said, not feeling sorry at all. “My friend and I’d like a table, please?”

The waiter led them to a table in the back of the tavern. The tables used to be extremely flimsy, ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. Now they could probably take a bantha standing on top of them and not collapse. “I’m going to figure out what’s going on here,” Zack said. “You stay here, only intervene if things look like they’re going to end in violence. You got my back?”

Melissa nodded. Zack believed her, at least when it came to the situation they were currently in. Whatever her plans really were, she was truly sincere about not wanting to hurt Milo, so she would ensure that Zack would come to no harm.

The bartender, a Zabrak that Zack had never seen in his life, had been reluctant to furnish the details that Zack wanted, but a hefty “tip” soon changed his mind. Some things never changed. Nar Shaddaa had undergone a shift in the balance of power since he had left. Vogga the Hutt, Zack’s patron and intense rival of the Society of the Dragon, had been assassinated and replaced with Egdirbniab the Hutt, who was widely considered to be a pawn of the Society.

Worse, all of Zack’s contacts were persona non grata at best, and on the run or dead at worst. That included the owner of the cantina, who had “committed suicide” and his assets placed in the hands of his alleged “cousin,” who was said to be a favored employee of Voivode Drako himself. Drako was rumored to occasionally dine at the tavern, although the bartender felt that those rumors were false, as no one telling them could agree on exactly what the famously reclusive voivode looked like.

Zack thanked the bartender. For a second, he felt certain that the bartender was, in fact, a human looking man with an angular face and hair trimmed into a widow’s peak, but then he blinked and he was a Zabrak again. He must have been more tired than he thought, he decided as he walked back over to Melissa’s table.

True to her word, Melissa hadn’t stirred up any trouble and was instead reading some sort of fashion magazine while sipping on an espresso. Zack filled her in on the situation. Melissa didn’t look all that surprised or concerned. “That’s the way of things in these places,” she pointed out. “Let’s have lunch here. I’m starved.”

“Are you kidding me?” Zack asked incredulously. “The food here probably costs an arm and a leg.”

“Not to worry,” Melissa said. “I’ll just use a five-finger discount, Force style.” She waved her hand dramatically to demonstrate exactly how she intended to do that.

“Are you sure that’s, you know, ethical?” Zack asked. Had he really just said that? Milo must have been rubbing off on him more than he thought.

“No less ethical than providing monetary support to a front for ruthless criminals,” Melissa retorted. Zack could see her point. More to the point, so could his stomach. He was starving, Nar Shaddaa was as pestilential as always, and he was worried about Milo. A good meal would probably do him a lot of good.

*****

Dakota had first met Mitchell two years ago, when he had been hired to hunt him down by a supposed “free agent,” who everyone knew was really working for Vogga the Hutt. He felt bad about taking jobs for the Hutts sometimes, but nothing short of a full scale Republic invasion would be able to dislodge them from power, and that’d happen when Mustafar froze over. Anyway, Vogga hadn’t been so bad, comparatively speaking. He was actually a pleasant fellow to be around, if you didn’t mind the smell and being associated with a mass murderer.

Finding him had taken a good six months and a hell of a lot of legwork, but it had all paid off when he found the great Jedi working in a delicatessen of all places. He had confirmed it by staging a robbery. Most people would have assumed that the blaster in the robber’s hand had just jammed. Dakota wasn’t one of those people.

Once Mitchell was positively identified, he struck…with a recruitment pitch. Dakota had been a loyal servant of the Republic, and even though he was a free agent now, he still refused to send a Jedi off to his end. And despite Mitchell’s claims to the contrary, he was still a Jedi. During the robbery, he had unhesitatingly made himself a shield between the nearest bystander and the robber. So he asked Mitchell to join him in bounty hunting.

It had taken a lot of persuasion, but Mitchell had finally seen the wisdom of combining their skills. With Dakota’s street smarts and military training and Mitchell’s precognition and astounding skill at telekinesis, they were a nearly unstoppable team. Dakota had grabbed a corpse burned beyond recognition of Mitchell’s general height, build, and skin color from a morgue, handed it over to the client, and the rest was history.

Their modus operandi involved subtlety and stealth. They always moved in the shadows and got the target to underestimate them before striking. It was just sensible. The Jedi, according to Mitchell, knew the value of subtlety. They were able to blend into a variety of different environments.

So why the kriff was Milo Murphy just cavalierly announcing that he was a Jedi to anyone who cared to listen?

All day, he had been listening to the same stories. Murphy had saved a woman from being raped, Murphy had saved a child from getting murdered, Murphy had saved a _pet_ from falling into a near bottomless pit. And every time, he had happily announced his affiliation with the Jedi Order, ostentatiously used Force powers to prove it, and had been accompanied by quite a few unlikely accidents. It was as if the man _wanted_ to be caught.

“What do you think?” Dakota asked Mitchell as they walked away from interrogating a beggar who had been given more credits than he’d likely seen in his life by Murphy. “What’s going on here? Is this guy just terminally dumb?”

“Milo may be naïve at times, but he’s quite intelligent,” Mitchell said. “I suspect that he’s acting this way to draw me out. He figures, quite correctly, that the last thing I want is for people to start wondering if there are _other_ Jedi in their midst.”

“Or maybe he wants revenge,” Dakota suggested. “I mean, I’d be pretty miffed if someone kicked me out of the Jedi when I was just _thirteen._ ”

Mitchell bristled. “We had no choice! He was a greater danger within the Jedi than outside of it. I had hoped that his Force powers and, with it, his connection to Murphy’s Law would atrophy. Unfortunately, they appear stronger than ever.”

Dakota didn’t buy Mitchell’s theories about Murphy. Or, if he was being honest with himself, it would be more accurate to say that he _hoped_ they weren’t true, because if they were, Murphy was in a whole lot of trouble and so, potentially, was everyone else. And he didn’t think that they had made the right choice kicking Murphy out either. He had just been a kid. Just because he could talk the talk of being an adult didn’t mean that he _was_ one. He had gone to war, and he had returned to nothing, and despite that, he was still trying to _help_ people. But he had long ago learned the futility of trying to get Mitchell that he was wrong about anything, ever.

“Well, if he wants to draw you out, maybe we should have it work,” Dakota suggested. “The sooner we learn what he wants, the sooner we can make sure he gets it and get him the heck off Nar Shaddaa to safety.”

Mitchell chuckled. “Oh, my friend, you have a lot to learn. _No_ place is safe when Milo Murphy is around.”

Dakota knew that their own departure would have to come along with Murphy’s departure. One didn’t cross Voivode Drako and have a high life expectancy, but they’d be relatively safe once they had returned to Republic space. And, honestly, perhaps it would be better for both of them if they got away from the stench – both moral and olfactory – of Nar Shaddaa. It would certainly be safer.

*****

If there _was_ one thing that Milo enjoyed on Nar Shaddaa, it was shopping. The markets were filled with antiquities of dubious authenticity, but there were also a few genuine articles scattered here and there, and looking for them had been a rare source of fun on a planet that Milo was increasingly starting to despise. He had bought a few with the full intention of donating them to their rightful owners or museums as appropriate when he was back in Republic space, but at least in the meantime, he could enjoy basking in their vintage glory.

A week had passed since he had first arrived. Thankfully, after the first day, Zack had agreed to be accompanying Milo again, and they alternated their traveling companions daily. Milo had tried to keep the affection between them to a minimum, as Zack wanted to keep their relationship on the down low, but after Zack had successfully identified a pot dating back to the days of Xim’s Empire, which both Milo _and_ the seller had dismissed, Milo couldn’t contain himself any longer. He took Zack into an alleyway and made out with him harder than he had with anyone in his whole life. Only the presence of witnesses had prevented him from going farther.

Zack proved to be a naturally skilled haggler, whereas Milo always either ended up knowing or suspecting that he was being shortchanged whenever he engaged in the practice. They had gotten the pot for ten percent lower than the vendor had been selling it for, and exponentially lower than its actual worth. Milo felt a tad guilty about the transaction, but he figured that once the pot was in a museum, he’d feel better.

“Take this, hide it somewhere, and _don’t_ tell me where it is,” Milo instructed Zack. The last thing he wanted was for this priceless historical artifact to fall victim to Murphy’s Law.

After Zack left, Milo looked over at Sara, who was holding a electrostaff in her hands and glowering at anyone who came near them. That and Diogee barking so loudly that he could probably be heard _planets_ away appeared to be successfully scaring off all aggressors. “You think that this is just a waste of time, don’t you?” he said.

“I think that if a Jedi _had_ come here, he’d be dead by now,” Sara said bluntly. “I’m honestly quite shocked that _you’re_ not dead now. I guess since the Society wants you alive, no one wants to strike at you. But, Milo, good luck can’t hold forever. Especially not _yours.”_

As if summoned by her words, a man split off from the crowd and charged directly towards Milo. At first, he looked human, but as he came closer, Milo could see that he was actually Echani, possessed of the alabaster skin, pure white hair, and silver irises that characterized the Echani. He did not appear armed, but that did not meant that he was harmless; the Echani were famous for their mastery of unarmed combat.

Sara pointed the electrostaff at the Echani’s head. “You stay away from my brother if you know what’s good for you, buddy. Now who are you, and what do you want?”

“Sean Woodman’s the name,” Woodman said, “and you’re in possession of stolen property.”

“OH, FORCE!” Milo shrieked. He should have _known_ better than to participate in the black market. “The pot? It belongs to you?!” 

Woodman stared at him like he was crazy. “I’m talking about the _Ebon Hawk._ It’s mine.”

“Actually, I think you’ll find that it isn’t,” Sara said firmly. “It belongs to our friend.”

“Yes, your friend Baljeet Tjinder, who got it from Phineas Flynn, who stole it from Professor Bannister, who stole it from _me!”_ Woodman retorted. “I’ve been stuck on this accursed planet for _six years._ That ship is _mine._ ”

Milo felt sympathy for Woodman, but at the same time, it wasn’t like _they_ had another ship lying around if they gave the _Hawk_ to him. The fate of the galaxy was at stake. Saving the free galaxy from the Pistachions took priority. “Maybe we could give you a ride when we leave the planet?” he suggested.

“Look, how do we even know that you’re telling the truth?” Sara pointed out. That was a good point, actually. The _Ebon Hawk’s_ provenance would probably be relatively easy to discover.

Woodman informed her of the location of two secret compartments on the ship. Milo gasped. If he had been telling the truth, then the location of Xim’s pot was now compromised! Murphy’s Law, he was relatively certain, couldn’t work on something whose location he was unaware of, but now all bets were off. Even the _thought_ of such a wonderful piece of history being smashed to bits was making him feel sick.

“Let me run this by my friend Zack,” Milo suggested eventually. “He can –”

Woodman abruptly let out a laugh. “Oh, that’s rich. You seriously think he’s your _friend?”_

Milo sometimes wished that he wasn’t so prone to blushing, especially at times when he needed to remain completely stoic in terms of his expressions. “Well, maybe friends with benefits is a better term,” he tried to bluff, but Woodman shook his head.

“That’s not what I was talking about,” Woodman said, his voice somber. “Zack Underwood is a coldhearted bastard, and if you have any sense at all, you’ll run as far as you can from him. I’ll give you some time to reconsider, but eventually I’ll be back to reclaim my property.”

Milo didn’t know what to think. He could sense that Zack had been holding elements of his past back, but he couldn’t possibly imagine that things were as bad as Woodman had been insinuating. Woodman had to have just been bluffing, trying to sow discord between the two of them. There was no other logical explanation. Right?

“I’ve got that pot so well hidden that I doubt _I’d_ be able to find it again,” Zack bragged when he returned. “Hey, what’s up? Did something happen while he was gone?”

Milo and Sara filled him in on what had happened with Woodman. Zack had just rolled his eyes when Milo had mentioned Woodman’s accusations. “This guy’s obviously a con artist,” Zack pronounced. “He wants a ship, he’s heard you’re a soft touch, and he came up with a story to con you.”

“He did know about the compartments,” Sara pointed out. “I know for a fact that both of those are real.”

“The _Hawk_ was a smugglers’ vessel for longer than the three of us have collectively been alive,” Zack retorted. “There are any one of a hundred places where he could have picked up that information. I’ve never seen or heard of this man in my life.”

Milo kissed Zack on the lips lightly, ignoring the gagging noises that Sara was making. “I believe you, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t trust you.”

Zack was silent for a while, apparently lost in thought. “Look, we’ve been all business this last week. We deserve some fun time. How’s about I take you out on a date? It’ll be our first, so I’ll make sure to make it extra special.”

“This _isn’t_ a date?” Milo asked, somewhat confused. He had very much been under the impression that it had been. Maybe he had misunderstood?

“It’s not a date with your sister watching our every move like a hawk-bat, no,” Zack explained. “I can handle guarding you for one night. It’s going to be great. I’ll take you dancing, we’ll have dinner at some classy restaurant, and then, well, let’s see where the rest of the night takes us, shall we, sweetheart?” He winked at Milo, who was practically ready to faint from excitement, and not just of one kind.

*****

Zack had done the one thing that he had sworn to himself that he had never do: He had lied to Milo. It wasn’t just lies of omission anymore. He was actively deceiving his boyfriend. He felt absolutely terrible about it. But he knew that if Milo found out the truth, the chances of him speaking to Zack again would be miniscule. If he had found out the truth from Sean, that chance would be nonexistent.

Maybe he wasn’t going about this the right way. Maybe it would be smarter to just get on his knees and beg Milo for forgiveness. But they were getting closer to their goal. He had been hearing rumors that a Jedi had been spotted in places that he knew Milo had never been. Perhaps it was just the rumor mill running amok, but maybe it was Mitchell trying to track down Milo. Once they found Mitchell and left Nar Shaddaa, no one would be able to tell Milo of Zack’s dark past.

He would settle things with Sean privately, he decided. Of course he would _never_ hand over the _Ebon Hawk,_ but it would be easy enough to have the pot forged and hand over the forgery instead. Sean didn’t possess the knowledge necessary to identify a fake, and by the time he realized it, they’d be in another sector. Greed, not vengeance, was Sean’s motivation, and one form of wealth was as good as another.

The rest of the day passed fairly uneventfully. Sean, thankfully, did not show his face again. They mostly chased down the rumors to no avail. Half of them were demonstrably false, and the other half were so vague as to be unfalsifiable. While Milo was distracted by conducting more acts of daring-do, Zack stealthily asked around to see where would be the best places to take Milo on their date. By the time the evening rolled around, he had a full itinerary planned in his head, including a hotel for the last segment of the date if he got lucky.

When they finally returned to the _Ebon Hawk,_ Zack had entirely put the guilt that he felt from deceiving Milo out of his mind. If he had still been doing the things that he did back then, that would be one thing, but he was a different man now. He had sworn off hurting people unnecessarily, and that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. In fact, he was in a pretty good mood, which was, of course, spoiled the moment he stepped on the ship.

“MILO!” Amanda screamed. “ZACK, SARA, HELP ME!”

They ran into the central area and found a yellow-skinned alien, probably female, of a species that Zack didn’t recognize. She was humanoid, but certainly nowhere close to human, with a large, bulbous mantle in the back of her head, funnels that looked sort of like ears on either side of her head, and had two tentacles instead of arms.

And she was holding a red lightsaber with a curved hilt to Amanda’s throat.

“I’m Darth Śfard, Milo,” she said, sounding almost sad, “and I’m afraid it’s time for you to die.”


End file.
